Convective Heat Transfer Between a Bead Packing and Its Bounding Wall: Part II—Numerical Analysis and Experimental Validation

The volume-averaged transport equations for wall confined bead packings were derived in Part I using a non-constant Representative Elementary Volume (REV). This eliminates the incompatibility of the volume-averaged quantities of the bead packing and pointwise quantities of the wall at the interface. This also allowed determining the exponential porosity profile directly from the packing structure for Reynolds-Averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations. In Part II, the governing equations proposed in Part I are used to simulate the forced convective heat transfer from the bead packing to its containing wall. The predictive capability of the model is validated by comparing with experimentally measured temperature and heat flux values. Further discussion shows that a close agreement between numerical and experimental results can be achieved if additional turbulence source terms induced by the presence of beads are properly modeled.