Abstract
An experimental study to evaluate the convective heat transfer coefficient in a cylindrical packed bed of spherical porous alumina particles is investigated. The task consists in proposing a semi-empirical model to avoid excessive instrumentation and time consumption. The measurement of the bed temperature associated to a simple energy balances led to calculate the gas to particle heat transfer coefficient using a logarithmic mean temperature difference method. These experiments were performed at atmospheric pressure. The operating fluid is humid air. The gas velocity and temperature ranged from 1.7-3 m/s and 120-158 degrees C, respectively. The data obtained was compared with the correlations reported in the literature. It is shown that the proposed model is in reasonable agreement with the correlation of Ranz and Marshall. Despite, many researches on experimental investigations of heat transfer coefficient in packed beds at low and average temperature are proposed, few studies presented calculation of convective heat transfer coefficient at high temperature (above 120 degrees C). A possible application of the proposed model is drying and combustion.