Ho to model the flow in a Regenerator
 

Hi Forum

I am considering to use OpenFOAM to model a closed gas circuit comprising two heat exchangers and one regenerator.

The problem involves turbulent flow and conjugate heat exchange.

I can model the HEX part using chtMultiRegionFoam, but as for the regenerator section, I plan to model a fine dense metallic wire mesh, having a very large surface to volume ratio ( the reduced period and length of the regenerator are low ), and using chtMultiRegionFoam here would entail me to explicitly mesh this thing... this is a no-go.

That leaves me with rhoPorousSimpleFoam.

Does anyone here knows how to model anisotropic thermal conductivity in the wire mesh ( transversally very high, and longitudinally very low ) as well as the heat storage effect... within rhoPorousSimpleFoam...?

Simply patching one more equation and a scalar field for temperature in the mesh in rhoPorousSimpleFoam wont do, because the flow field and the heat convective transport are strongly coupled...

Is "hacking" rhoPorousSimpleFoam the most numerically "sane" way to model a dense packed bed or wire mesh regenerator... or are there any smarter choices...?

Thanks in advance

Alex

Thermal storage
 

C'mon ppl...

Is there nobody interested in recovering thermal energy from a flow... :-) ?

Alex

Alex,

Have you come across a solution to modeling the regenerator? I'm trying to model one myself and would really really like to find a way to do it with out explicitly meshing something like that. Please let me know
(I'm using ICEM and Fluent v12)

-Christopher