Constructal design of regenerators

Abstract

SUMMARY This paper documents the fundamental problem of designing a porous flow architecture that meets the requirements of facilitating flow access while storing and releasing heat to a flowing fluid. Examples of such designs are regenerators that operate cyclically in various types of heating or reheating furnaces. The main geometrical scales are determined for parallel flow channels in a fixed regenerator volume with a fixed porosity, by matching the time scales of convection along the channels and thermal diffusion. In accord with the constructal law, the route to better architectures for maximum heat transfer and minimum pressure losses is the morphing of the regenerator architecture from parallel channels to dendritic channels. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Current trends in constructal law and evolutionary design

“…The distribution of the cold gas volume along a number of flow passages through the stator structure corresponds to the constructal spacing obtained with the method of intersecting the asymptotes, and offers a decrease in the peak temperatures. New configurations for generators operating cyclically in heating or reheating furnaces were proposed in Bejan, Lorente, and Kang by viewing the regenerator as a porous structure for which every geometrical feature can be discovered in the direction of facilitating the heat flow.…”

Optimal Design of a Dual-Pressure Steam Turbine for Rankine Cycle Based on Constructal Theory

“…In the engineering field, constructal theory [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26] provides a new idea for the optimal design of various transfer systems. For power plants, this theory has been used in the structure optimizations of boilers [27][28][29][30][31], evaporators [32][33][34][35], condensers [36][37][38][39], regenerators [40,41], turbines [42][43][44][45][46][47] and whole systems [48][49][50]. In the constructal research of the turbines, Kim et al [42] studied the weight distribution problem of a DPST for land power plants with a fixed total weight and gained the maximum power output (PO) and optimal weight distribution.…”

Fishbone structures for thermochemical energy storage in porous systems

“…Insights on the tube length can be estimated from the determination of the entropy generated during the process. The heat transfer irreversibilities are given by [33] S ̇gen,∆T ~q∆T T 2…”