Tomography based determination of permeability, Dupuit–Forchheimer coefficient, and interfacial heat transfer coefficient in reticulate porous ceramics

A computer tomography based methodology is applied to determine the transport properties of fluid flow across porous media. A 3D digital representation of a 10-ppi reticulate porous ceramic (RPC) sample was generated by X-ray tomographic scans. Structural properties such as the porosity, specific interfacial surface area, pore-size distribution, mean survival time, two-point correlation function s2, and local geometry distribution of the RPC sample are directly extracted from the tomographic data. Reference solutions of the fluid flow governing equations are obtained for Re = 0.2–200 by applying finite volume direct pore-level numerical simulation (DPLS) using unstructured, body-fitted, tetrahedral mesh discretization. The permeability and the Dupuit–Forchheimer coefficient are determined from the reference solutions by DPLS, and compared to the values predicted by selected porous media flow models, namely: conduit-flow, hydraulic radius theory, drag models, mean survival time bound, s2-bound, fibrous bed correlations, and local porosity theory-based models. DPLS is further employed to determine the interfacial heat transfer coefficient and to derive a corresponding Nu-correlation, which is compared to empirical correlations.