Meinicke

Solid sponges are open-celled, highly porous ceramic or metal foams with a large specific surface area. Due to these advantageous intrinsic properties, such sponges combine low pressure drops with comparably high heat transfer rates. If inserted into a reactor or a heat exchanger pipe, the continuity of the solid sponge matrix leads to a much more efficient overall heat supply or withdrawal, respectively, as compared to conventional packings. This is why sponges are already used in heat-intensive applications today, such as porous burners and solar receivers. It is the objective of this project to develop a CFD modeling approach based on existing computer tomography (µCT) scans of the original sponge geometry. In previous works, a CFD model for an adequate description of single-phase hydrodynamics and heat transfer in solid sponges has been set up, introducing various crucial modeling parameters, such as shape and size of representative elementary volume (REV) of the sponge under investigation, type of STL geometry representation, mesh resolution and refinement factors, boundary condition specifications, solver settings etc.

Fig.1: CFD simulation results for velocity field (left: corresponding streamlines) and temperature field (right) of single-phase flow through cylindrical SiSiC sponge REV

It is the goal of this Bachelor thesis to systematically investigate and analyze the influence of these modeling parameters, especially on CFD simulation results obtained for pressure drop and heat transfer coefficients.