CFD of Flow and Temperature Control Using Porous Materials

The use of porous materials, in particular, for passive control of flow and thermal purposes has received considerable academic and industrial attention over the past five decades. Examples include transpiration cooling, packed bed energy storage and battery and LED cooling, as well as noise control for aerospace and wind turbine applications. In such applications fundamental understanding of the interaction between the fluid flow and the porous medium at the pore-scale is deterministic for efficient thermal, flow and noise control.

Turbulent flow in porous materials has been subject to a confusing history, and at times it has been mistakenly thought that turbulence does not occur at all in such materials. Continued study has not only reaffirmed the existence of such flow but led to detailed modelling of low Reynolds number turbulence (up to Rep~3000) for small geometries through the use of direct numerical simulation (DNS). But The computational requirements preclude DNS being used for higher Reynolds number flows.

This project aims to investigate flow and thermal control using porous materials for application to aerospace and renewable energy systems; to perform fundamental analysis of fluid flow and heat transfer in porous materials; and to achieve an in-depth understanding of the flow features at the pore-scale. The project will do this by performing high fidelity CFD using a Large Eddy Simulation in OpenFOAM to analyse the details of the high Reynolds number turbulent flow and temperature fields.