Title: Enhancement of 3D mass and heat transfer within a porous ceramic exchanger by flow-induced vibration

Abstract

Heat transfer advancements in heat transfer devices such as heat exchanger shave received a lot of attention. One of the promising techniques is the use of porous media that can highly improve heat and mass transport in energy systems. Therefore, porous media have been utilized for a variety of industrial purposes, but there is still room to investigate new uses for porous media, particularly in heat exchangers. This work investigates heat transfer enhancement for a porous ceramic heat exchanger. The effect of flow-induced vibration of exchanging air flow through porous tube banks has been tested. A numerical model able to assess the vibration effect on heat and mass transfer inside a porous ceramic exchanger has been carefully developed. A three-dimensional unstructured control volume finite element method (CVFEM) is developed to simulate the transport phenomena that arise during convective exchange. In this respect, several numerical tests have been conducted. The time evolution of temperature, liquid saturation, and pressure of the porous domain are analyzed and compared for two cases: with and without vibration. It is found that the vibration highly enhances the heat and mass transfer inside the ceramic exchanger. As a result, the gain of exchanging time to reach the thermal equilibrium between the hot air and the porous domain was 75% for the case of air vibration under saw tooth type at a frequency of fv=5Hz and Vmax=10 m/s compared to no vibrating exchange.