Flow and Heat Transfer in a Parallel-Plate Channel with Porous and Solid Baffles

ABSTRACT

Simulations are presented for laminar flow in a channel containing baffles made with solid (impermeable) and porous materials. The equations of mass continuity, momentum and energy are written for an elementary representative volume, yielding a set of equations valid for the entire computational domain. These equations are discretized using the control-volume method and the resulting system of algebraic equations is relaxed with the SIMPLE method. The numerical results for the friction factor f and for the Nusselt number Nu are compared with available data, indicating that results herein differ by less than 5% in relation to published results. Further simulations comparing the effectiveness of the porous material used show that no advantages are obtained when using low-porosity baffles in the laminar flow regime investigated here.

The authors would like to thank CNPq and FAPESP, Brazil, for their invaluable financial support during the course of this research.