unidirectional flow in porous media
 

I'm trying to simulate gas flow through a bundle of hollow tubes. Is it possible to model this bundle as a porous media while constraining the flow to only one direction (along the axis of the hollow tubes)? Does anyone have any experience with problems such as this?

thanks in advance for any help

Re: unidirectional flow in porous media
 

Just set a very large resistance in the other coordinate directions.

Re: unidirectional flow in porous media
 

evan, thanks for the post

i have been trying this, but i still get a great deal of flow in the two 'wrong' directions... i think i may have the resistance coefficients mixed up...

should the viscous resistance coefficient be small in the 'correct' flow direction and large in the 'wrong' flow directions?

thanks again

Re: unidirectional flow in porous media
 

Hello:

If you are planning to model porous media for "Tube Banks" you should be playing with Inertia Resistance. As C2 is very large & (1/alpha) can be taken as Zero for Flow through the Tube banks.

Referene : 6.19.2 of Fluent Help.

Correct me If you are wrong.

Regards, -guru.

Re: unidirectional flow in porous media
 

btw One more thing ...the the difference in the resistance coefficients shouldn't be more than 3 order. say If you have 200 1/m in the flow direction then other two directions shouldn't have more than 200e3 1/m for the better convergence..

regards-guru.

Re: unidirectional flow in porous media
 

Guru, Thank you for the advice! I never thought to search the help files for "tube bank"... hopefully this will help.

Thanks again, Brian

Re: unidirectional flow in porous media
 

Guru, Thanks for the tip! I ran a few iterations and then checked my contours/vectors and everything seems to be acting much more like it should. I really appreciate the help!

-Brian