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Department of Technical Thermal Engineering, Technical Engineering College of Kirkuk, Northern Technical University Iraq
Department of Technical Thermal Engineering, Technical Engineering College of Kirkuk, Northern Technical University Iraq
In the current experimental study, a rectangular channel packed with a porous medium is used to study the thermo-hydraulic performance of a forced convection air heater. In addition to heat transfer enhancement, various experimental setups (Works 1 to 4) have been used to investigate the combined effects of the disruption of the thermal boundary layers and flow resistances for different values of the Reynolds number, which was achieved through the geometric configuration of a horizontal cylindrical heater placed in the porous medium. The results reveal that, in contrast to the baseline case of an empty channel, adding the porous medium has an enormously enhanced ability to heat up the Air. While having an optimal improvement of 358.05% for lower flow speeds in increasing the maximal Nusselt number, the optimal configuration (Work 4) performed best in purely thermal efficiency considerations. However, despite such performance enhancement, there is also an inevitable increase in the static pressure drop, which was also found to follow a non-linear for cheider model. To evaluate the practical applicability of such modifications in relation to their performance improvement in an effective manner, the Performance Evaluation Criteria (PEC) index was also considered in this study.
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