Packed Bed Behaviour in Dendritic Design of Tubes

Abstract

A study, supported by a theoretical analysis, is performed to investigate the optimal design of a dendritic network of tubes filled partially or fully with packed bed of spheres. This fundamental study underpins a range of applications including thermal energy storage, and chemical processing and bioprocess applications [1-4]. The optimal design falls under the category of constrained optimization [5-7]. Applying the constraint directly into a global function to optimize, via chain rule, and the method of equal thermodynamic distance are employed to obtain the geometry that minimize the losses due to irreversible processes accompanying the flows. The geometry dependence of sizes of tubes, size of beds, porosity and Reynolds number is examined.