Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow in Porous Media

Gazy Al-Sumaily, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering.
This project relates to numerical simulations for the problem of heat transfer and fluid flow in porous media. Due to the need to peform computational calculations requiring significant processing power, the Monash Sun Grid has been utilised to solve five coupled partial differential equations. Three of the equations are Continuity and Momentum equations that aim to estimate the velocity field inside the medium, and the another two algorithms are  energy equations for the fluid and solid phases that aim to calculate the temperature distributions through the these two phases. The objective of the project is to study the effect of some parameters such as the Reynolds number, the porosity of the domain and the boundary conditions on the hydrodynamic and thermal behaviour in the packed bed of spheres.