Abstract
To improve the understanding of convective melting of packed solid particles in a fluid, an experimental investigation is conducted to study the melting characteristics of a packed bed by unmasking the buoyancy forces due to the density difference between the melt and solid particles. A close-loop apparatus, named the particle-melting-in-flow (PMF) module, is designed to allow a steady state liquid flow under a specified temperature. The module is on board NASA’s KC-135 reduced gravity aircraft for the experiments. In the test module, water is used as the fluid, and ice particles are fed to the test section at the beginning of the test. As the liquid flows though the bed, the solid grains melt. A perforate plate, through which liquid can flow while the ice particles are retained, bounds the downstream of the packed bed. From the digital video images the local packed bed thickness is measured under control flow rate, and the melting rate is determined. The temperature distribution along the horizontal direction and vertical direction is measured using 19 thermocouples. An infrared camera is mounted to record the local temperature variation between liquid and solid. The melting rates are presented as a function of upstream flow velocity, temperature and initial average particle size of the packed bed. It is found that the melting rate is influenced mainly by the ratio of the Reynolds number (Re, based on the initial particle diameter) to the square of the Froud number (Fr), and me Stefan number (Ste). In general, the dimensionless melting rate decreases as Re/Fr2 increases and increases as Ste increases. With the absence of gravity, i.e., Froud number approaches infinity, a maximum melting rate can be achieved for otherwise the same test conditions. The increase in the melting rate with the increase in Stephan number also becomes more pronounced under the zero gravity condition.
Experimental investigation of two-phase gas-liquid flow in microchannel with T-junction
