Study on heat transfer of porous media for isothermal chamber

Isothermal chamber, which is fabricated by empty chamber stuffed with thin metal wires, could be used for testing the flow rate characteristics of pneumatic component and for forming unsteady flow generator, and its temperature characteristics are critical to its application results. In this paper, based on the stuffers in isothermal chamber were considered as porous media with large porosity and its physical parameters were tested by experiments, temperature characteristics during discharge of three isothermal chambers were studied by experiments and numerical simulations. From the results of experiment and simulation, compared with discharge of empty chamber, it could be seen the discharge processes of chamber A, B and C are nearly isothermal. Though there are differences between simulation and experiment, they share same trends and the simulation result was affected by ETC (effective thermal conductivity) greatly. Consequently, numerical simulation is an efficient, energy-saving and cost-reducing method. (c) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.