Particle-resolved CFD modeling of the flow and heat transfer characteristics of the fluid in a fixed bed

The strategy of particle-resolved computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has been widely used to study the hy-drodynamic properties of fluid flow in small-sized pebble bed, but generally suffers from the tedious creation of body-fitted grids. Previously, we proposed a novel particle-resolved CFD strategy, p-IBM, which combines mesh-adaption and the immersed boundary method. The primary objective of this work is to test different mesh-adaption strategies and evaluate the quantitative accuracy degree of p-IBM simulations. For this purpose, two packed bed systems reported in the literature are simulated based on the p-IBM strategy. The flow behavior and heat transfer properties of the interstitial gas are analyzed and compared with published experimental results. Comparisons show that the simulation results are in quantitative agreement with the experimental data. This work thus lays a solid foundation for future detailed investigations of the flow and transfer performance of fluid in a small-sized pebble bed.