An Investigation into the Effect of Porous Medium on Performance of Heat Exchanger

In this paper, a detailed numerical investigation of two-dimensional laminar forced convection in a porous channel with inlet and outlet slot is presented. A uniform heat flux is applied on one wall of channel and another wall is isolated. The flow in the porous medium is modeled using the Brinkman-Forchheimer-extended Darcy model in which the inertia and boundary effects are taken into consideration and thermal dispersion effects are not included in the energy equation. Parametric studies are conducted to evaluate the effects of particle diameter, Reynolds number on the heat transfer and friction factor. Nusselt number and friction factor are developed for efficient design of a porous heat exchanger based on the present configuration. In order to solve this problem Fluent software was used.