Analysis of the Fluid-Thermal Regime with the Developed Brinkman Model in a Porous Coil for Solar Energy Application

In this paper, heat transfer and fluid flow characteristics in a porous coil have been investigated. The characteristic of the boundary layer, distribution of velocity, pressure, and thermal field effects into a porous coil as high heat transfer resource have been analyzed. The developed Brinkman method in fluid flow and power law model of conduction heat transfer coefficient considering porosity and permeability factor is calculated for constant solar heat flux. In order to solve the problem, the COMSOL software based on finite element method with porous medium algorithm is used, using the MUMPS solver. The comparison between variation of normalized temperature at the presented model and experimental data at similar conditions shows an acceptable agreement with an error up to 3%. At constant permeability, decreasing the porosity coefficient, velocity profile is extended due to presence of pores into coil with an accelerated flow, so that the maximum velocity is equal to 2.5m/s at porosity coefficient of 0.2. In porous coil, Nusselt number increased, where the greatest difference between porous and the nonporous coil occurs at the beginning of the coil, with a value of 32%, and the smallest difference is 27%. In the porous coil, absorbing solar energy is higher and the heat transfer is improved. However, the amount of pressure drop also increases.