Engineering innovations—including those in heat and mass transfer—are needed to provide food, water, and power to a growing population (i.e., projected to be 9.8 × 109 by 2050) with limited resources. The interweaving of these resources is embodied in the food, energy, and water (FEW) nexus. This review paper focuses on heat and mass transfer applications which involve at least two aspects of the FEW nexus. Energy and water topics include energy extraction of natural gas hydrates and shale gas; power production (e.g., nuclear and solar); power plant cooling (e.g., wet, dry, and hybrid cooling); water desalination and purification; and building energy/water use, including heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and refrigeration technology. Subsequently, this review considers agricultural thermal fluids applications, such as the food and water nexus (e.g., evapotranspiration and evaporation) and the FEW nexus (e.g., greenhouses and food storage, including granaries and freezing/drying). As part of this review, over 100 review papers on thermal and fluid topics relevant to the FEW nexus were tabulated and over 350 research journal articles were discussed. Each section discusses previous research and highlights future opportunities regarding heat and mass transfer research. Several cross-cutting themes emerged from the literature and represent future directions for thermal fluids research: the need for fundamental, thermal fluids knowledge; scaling up from the laboratory to large-scale, integrated systems; increasing economic viability; and increasing efficiency when utilizing resources, especially using waste products.
Thermal hydraulics, in certain components of nuclear reactor systems, involve complex flow scenarios, such as flows assisted by free jets and stratified flows leading to turbulent mixing and thermal fluctuations. These complex flow patterns and thermal fluctuations can be extremely critical from a reactor safety standpoint. The component-level lumped approximations (0D) or one-dimensional approximations (1D) models for such components and subsystems in safety analysis codes cannot capture the physics accurately, and may introduce a large degree of modeling uncertainty. On the other hand, high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics codes, which provide numerical solutions to the Navier–Stokes equations, are accurate but computationally intensive, and thus cannot be used for system-wide analysis. An alternate way to improve reactor safety analysis is by building reduced-order emulators from computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes to improve system scale models. One of the key challenges in developing a reduced-order emulator is to preserve turbulent mixing and thermal fluctuations across different-length scales or time-scales. This paper presents the development of a reduced-order, non-linear, “Markovian” statistical surrogate for turbulent mixing and scalar transport. The method and its implementation are demonstrated on a canonical problem of differentially heated channel flow, and high-resolution direct numerical simulations (DNS) data are used for emulator or surrogate development. This statistical surrogate model relies on Kramers–Moyal expansion and emulates the turbulent velocity signal with a high degree of accuracy.
The food-energy-water nexus considers critical resource challenges which must be resolved in order to meet the needs of a growing population. Agriculture is the largest global water user, accounting for two-thirds of global water withdrawals, including water for crop irrigation. Understanding and therefore reducing evaporation of water from soil is an approach to conserve water resources globally. This work studies evaporation of water from a simulated soil column and employs x-ray imaging to determine the location of water in the porous media. A 30-mL beaker was filled with approximately 1700 2-mm hydrophilic glass beads. Water (i.e., 5.5 mL) was added to the simulated soil, comprised of glass beads and a heat flux (i.e., 1500 W/m2) was applied to the beaker using a solar simulator and the intensity was measured with a light meter. Real-time mass measurements were recorded during evaporation and X-ray imaging was utilized to capture liquid transport during evaporation. Images were post-processed using Matlab; the position of the liquid front was determined from this imaging. Across three replications, it took 47 hours on average to evaporate 5 mL of the total 5.5 mL of water. The transitions between evaporation Stage I, II, and III evaporation rates were determined using mass data and x-ray imaging; transition between Stages I and II occurred between approximately 4 and 9 hours, and the transition from Stage II to III evaporation occurred between approximately 18 and 24 hours. The result of this experiment will be useful to understand the liquid transport and formation of liquid bridges during evaporation from soil.
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