Investigations of heat transfer in fixed porous beds for application to thermal swing separation processes

Theoretical considerations are described for several classical formulations of the problem of transient heat transfer in a flowing gas, porous solid media, namely the single-phase and two-phase models. The experimental aspects of this work centered on study of the transient heating and cooling response of the packed bed, and verification of the analytically predicted gas and solid phase temperature gradient equality in the flow regime of interest. The result obtained confirms the analytically predicted temporal and spacial equality of the gas and solid temperature profiles within the bed. These results were obtained by comparing the transient response of the bed wall temperature, approximately that of the solid near the walls, and the transient response of the gas temperature near the wall.