Experimental investigation of heat transfer in a packed bed of iron ore particles

Abstract

Paper presented at the 5th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, South Africa, 1-4 July, 2007.

Packed bed studies have been carried out to estimate effective thermal conductivity and wall-to-bed interfacial heat transfer coefficient using comparative method. Heat transfer in packed bed has contributions from conduction, convection from gas phase and interparticle radiation. To separate the effect of convection, experiments have been carried out in air as well as in vacuum. The convective contribution to the effective thermal conductivity has been found to vary little with average bed temperature. The variation of convective heat transfer coefficient with effective temperature difference between the wall and the particle at the vicinity of the wall found to follow a power law relation.