The Numerical Simulations Of The Mixing Of Hot And Cold Fluids In The T-Junction With Porous Medium

Porous medium is a kind of multiphase space with solid frameworks. The pore space with random or ordered distribution can be connected or not connected. With the development of science and technology, porous medium has been widely used in many scientific and engineering fields due to its special physical properties such as the high surface area to volume ratio. The studies of porous medium play important roles in the industry, energy, environment and so on, and the heat and mass transfer in porous medium has become an advanced subject of engineering thermophysics and other related areas in international.In the piping systems of petroleum, chemical, nuclear and other plants, the T-junctions are widely used to connect pipes and optimize pipelines. When two fluids with different temperature meet in the T-junction, the thermal fluctuation characterized by random temperature fluctuations will occur. The thermal fluctuations near the wall may lead to thermal fatigue failures and cracks on wall, and even the pipes leak. Therefore, in order to improve the safety of industrial production, reducing the thermal fluctuations of the fluid in T-junctions is particularly important. For this aim, filling porous medium in T-junction is a worthwhile method to research.In this paper, numerical simulation of the mixing process of hot and cold fluids in the T-junction with sintered copper spheres porous medium were accomplished by using large eddy simulation (LES), and the pressure, instantaneous temperatures and velocities in channel were obtained. The result of comparison between the obtained data and clean channel's data shows that the porous medium can reduce the temperature and velocity fluctuations effectively, but increase flow resistance and enhance the pressure drop significantly.Different packed types of porous medium are also discussed in this article, and the simulant data of T-junction with around/center/full porous medium are compared. The result shows that the pressure drop in channels with around and center porous are much less than full porous medium's, and the general effect of fluids mixing in T-junction with around porous is the best in these three types.