Numerical Simulation of Heat Transfer in Stacked Goods

The usage of industrial furnaces covers every aspect of daily life. For designing and optimizing the production process of industrial furnaces, numerical simulation is an indispensable tool. But for large-scale continuous-type furnaces, due to their extremely large computational domain and the highly contrasted geometric size ratio between the furnace and the corresponding stacked goods, it is hardly possible to carry out a full-scale 3D simulation with an acceptable computational resource to resolve the heat treatment processes in the furnace. In addition to the scale ratio problem, the stacked goods usually move inside the continuous-type furnace, which will make the modeling tasks more challenging for conventional simulation approaches.
In this work, a Simplified Porous Media Approach (SPMA) was proposed as a multi-scale modeling approach for such continuous-type furnaces. The initial idea of this approach was to create an effective and robust numerical modeling methodology for predicting both the average and the local heat transfer characteristics of the Single Unit Cell (SUC) inside the stacks of stapled goods in a quick, inexpensive and accurate way.