THERMAL SCIENCE

International Scientific Journal

K. Mahesh

,

B. Jayaraman

AN EXPERIMENTAL AND NUMERICAL INVESTIGATION ENHANCE HEAT TRANSFER IN POROUS HEAT EXCHANGERS FOR WASTE HEAT RECOVERY SYSTEM

ABSTRACT
The energy from an internal combustion engine’s exhaust gas can be used to operate a vapour absorption refrigeration system, which cools the interior of the vehicle. An exhaust gas-powered porous heat exchanger can be used in place of a generator in vapour absorption refrigeration systems. In this study, a double pipe counter flow heat exchanger with and without porous materials (wire screens) is analyzed numerically to maximise heat transfer from hot air to cold fluid with a minimum of pressure drop using the ANSYS FLUENT tool. Wire screens are used in this heat exchanger due to their higher surface area density. In order to assess their effects on the heat exchanger’s effectiveness, the number transfer unit, and the pressure drop under steady-state conditions, tests are conducted. The impacts of the wire screens presence are investigated for both water and aqua ammonia as cold fluids, as well as for varying hot air mass-flow rates. Furthermore, the numerical estimations of heat transfer from hot air to cold water are validated by experimental data. Compared to a heat exchanger without porous material, the effectiveness of a porous heat exchanger increases from 0.17-0.33. The numerical investigation outcomes and the experimental validation are quite comparable.
KEYWORDS
Porous Media Heat exchanger, Wire screens, computational fluid dynamics, vapour absorption refrigeration
PAPER SUBMITTED: 2025-07-03
PAPER REVISED: 2025-09-10
PAPER ACCEPTED: 2025-09-16
PUBLISHED ONLINE: 2025-11-08
DOI REFERENCE: https://doi.org/10.2298/TSCI250703190M
CITATION EXPORT: view in browser or download as text file
THERMAL SCIENCE YEAR 2026, VOLUME 30, ISSUE No. 2, PAGES [1327 - 1339]
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An experimental and numerical investigation enhance heat transfer in porous heat exchangers for waste heat recovery system

© 2026 Society of Thermal Engineers of Serbia. Published by the Vinča Institute of Nuclear Sciences, National Institute of the Republic of Serbia, Belgrade, Serbia. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International licence