The Impact of Cylindrical Fuel Assemblies’ Arrangement on the Heat and Mass Transfers into an Horizontal Porous Circular Cylinder

Abstract

The present work refers to the investigation of natural convection into an horizontal porous circular cylinder, driven by cooperating thermal and solutal buoyancy forces. The circular cylinder is maintained at constant temperature and concentration lower than that of four inner, heat and solute, ones which are arranged in two different manners. The physical model for the momentum conservation equation makes use of the Brinkman extension of the classical Darcy equation, the set of coupled equations is solved using the finite volume method and the SIMPLER algorithm. Through a parametric study, the effects of the distance between the cylinders on the thermal and solutal characteristics are widely inspected. Then, powerful correlations predicting the mean transfer inside the porous medium as a function of the cylinders’ disposition are proposed, which predict within ±1% the numerical results. It is to note that the validity of the computing code used was ascertained by comparing our results with the experimental and the numerical ones already available in the literature