Thermal enhancement of solid desiccant packed bed dehumidifier under forced convection in subsonic flow regime

Three packed beds of solid desiccants with different configurations have been modelled and simulated under forced convection in subsonic flow regime. The beds were of varied lengths but their collective porous sections and other parameters were similar. The simulation was carried out using the thermal equilibrium porous jump model in ANSYS Fluent and solutions computed using the density based coupled implicit solver. The results show wall heat transfer parameters to be relatively high around porous media insert for all three configurations. It is also demonstrated that narrowing the clear fluid section between porous insert impacts on the flow behaviour and the thermal enhancement of the bed. Flow behaviour for all three packed bed configurations was found to be significantly different in the three configurations.