Determination of Flow and Heat-Transfer Parameters in Porous Media With Consideration of Density Variation of Working Fluid

An experimental investigation is conducted to determine the flow and heat-transfer parameters of porous media with the consideration of density-variation effect of the working fluid. The permeability (K), inertial coefficient (F), and local convective heat transfer coefficient (h_loc) are determined for two types of metal screens at Reynolds numbers ranging from 20 to 400. A single-blow transient technique combined with a compressible non-local-thermal-equilibrium model determines the h_loc. The compressible non-local-thermal-equilibrium model is also adopted in a Levenberg-Marquardt optimization technique for deducing the K and F from measured steady-state pressure drops at different flow rates. Results show that the permeability increases with the increase of the porosity. A set of empirical correlations is obtained for calculating the Nusselt number. Results also show that, under the test condition of this study, consideration of the density-variation effect would improve the accuracy in deducing the K, F, and h_loc.