SUMMARY

Solid-fluid thermal interactions during unsteady flow in porous media play an important role in the regenerators of pulse tube cryocoolers. Pore-level thermal processes in porous media under unsteady flow conditions are poorly understood. The objective of this investigation is to study the pore-level thermal phenomena during pulsating flow through a generic, two-dimensional porous medium by numerical analysis. Furthermore, an examination of the effects of flow pulsations on the thermal dispersion and heat transfer coefficient that are encountered in the standard, volume-average energy equations for porous media are carried out. The investigated porous media are periodic arrays of square cylinders. Detailed numerical data for the porosity range of 0.64 to 0.84, with flow Reynold's numbers from 0-1000 are obtained. Based on these numerical data, the instantaneous as well as cycle-average thermal dispersion and heat transfer coefficients, to be used in the standard unsteady volume-average energy conservation equations for flow in porous media, are derived. Also, the adequacy of current applied cycle-average correlations for heat transfer coefficients and the inclusion of the thermal dispersion in the definition of an effective fluid thermal conductivity are investigated.