Tomography based determination of permeability, Dupuit-Forchheimer coefficient, and interfacial heat transfer coefficient in reticulate porous ceramics

A computer tomography based methodology is applied to determine the transport properties of fluid flow across porous media. A 3D digital representation of a 10-ppi reticulate porous ceramic (RPC) sample was generated by X-ray tomographic scans. Structural properties such as the porosity, specific interfacial surface area, pore-size distribution, mean survival time, two-point correlation function S-2, and local geometry distribution of the RPC sample are directly extracted from the tomographic data. Reference solutions of the fluid flow governing equations are obtained for Re = 0.2-200 by applying finite volume direct pore-level numerical simulation (DPLS) using unstructured, body-fitted, tetrahedral mesh discretization. The permeability and the Dupuit-Forchheimer coefficient are determined from the reference solutions by DPLS, and compared to the values predicted by selected porous media flow models, namely: conduit-flow, hydraulic radius theory, drag models, mean survival time bound, S-2-bound, fibrous bed correlations, and local porosity theory-based models. DPLS is further employed to determine the interfacial heat transfer coefficient and to derive a corresponding Nu-correlation, which is compared to empirical correlations. (c) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.