Accounting for porous structure in effective thermal conductivity calculations in a pebble bed reactor

A proper understanding of the mechanisms of heat transfer, flow and pressure drop through a packed bed of spheres is of utmost importance in the design of a high temperature pebble bed reactor. A thorough knowledge of the porous structure within the packed bed is important to any rigorous analysis of the transport phenomena, as all the heat and flow mechanisms are influenced by the porous structure. In this paper a new approach is proposed to simulate the effective thermal conductivity employing a combination of new and existing correlations for randomly packed beds. More attention is given to packing structure based on coordination number and contact angles, resulting in a more rigorous differentiation between the bulk and near-wall regions. The model accounts for solid conduction, gas conduction, contact area, surface roughness as well as radiatio