Numerical Simulation of Heat Storage and Recovery Processes in Porous Media

Abstract

A conjugate numerical model proposed by Nakayama et al. for the problem of cooling a fluid flowing through aspiral coil, has been successfully extended to investigate the processes of heat storage and recovery associated with a packed bed saturated with a molten salt. An axi-symmetric numerical procedure is described for determining the temperature development in the heat storage process. For the heat recovery process, a one-dimensional heat balance equation for the two-phase flow within a coil is introduced to update the wall surface temperatures, which are needed to calculate the temperature field in the packed bed. The numerical results for both storage and recovery processes agree very well with the corresponding temperature data obtained from the experiment.