The thermal non-equilibrium porous media modelling for CFD study of woven wire matrix of a Stirling regenerator

Different numerical methods can be applied to the analysis of the flow through the Stirling engine regenerator. One growing approach is to model the regenerator as porous medium to simulate and design the full Stirling engine in three-dimensional (3-D) manner. In general, the friction resistance coefficients and heat transfer coefficient are experimentally obtained to describe the flow and thermal non-equilibrium through a porous medium. A finite volume method (FVM) based non-thermal equilibrium porous media modelling approach characterizing the fluid flow and heat transfer in a representative small detailed flow domain of the woven wire matrix is proposed here to obtain the porous media coefficients without further requirement of experimental studies. The results are considered to be equivalent to those obtained from the detailed woven wire matrix for the pressure drop and heat transfer. Once the equivalence between the models is verified, this approach is extended to model oscillating regeneration cycles through a full size regenerator porous media for two different woven wire matrix configurations of stacked and wound types. The results suggest that the numerical modelling approach proposed here can be applied with confidence to model the regenerator as a porous media in the multi-dimensional (multi-D) simulations of Stirling engines.