Numerical Analysis of the Effect of Porous Structure on Pressure Distribution in Heat Exchangers Using CFD

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the effect of the arrangement of porous layers on pressure drop through a numerical simulation using CFD techniques in ANSYS Fluent software. In this study, a two-dimensional model was constructed for a horizontal channel containing three consecutive porous layers with different values of porosity, such that they are arranged transversely within the channel. The simulations were carried out for six different porous layer arrangements, where only the positions of these layers were swapped with each other in these cases without changing the porous values or the thickness of layers. While keeping all parameters of the simulation unchanged, including the outlet pressure and the air inlet velocity. The results comparison showed that by changing the arrangement of the porous layers, the pressure losses can be reduced by up to 34.5% while maintaining a relatively high value of pressure at the outlet of these layers. This, in turn, improves the operational efficiency by choosing the arrangement that achieves the least resistance and therefore the least losses.