LAUSR

Abstract The presence of the confining wall exerts critical influences on packing structure, as well as transport properties of packed beds with small D/d ratios. In the present work, the variations of pressure drop and particle-to-fluid convective heat transfer in the packed beds of strong wall interference were evaluated under the high Reynolds number regime (Rem ∼ 104) by using the CFD simulation combined with the DEM method for random packing generation. The variations upon the D/d ratios were discussed, and the applicability of empirical correlations was examined. It found that the lower D/d ratios, the lower pressure drop and heat transfer performance, and the Carman correlation and the Wakao correlation provided predictions of better accuracy for the two parameters respectively than the other empirical correlations. Then, the discussion was extended to the packing structure and fluid flow distribution. A packed bed with distinct features—the quasi-regular packed bed—was encountered at D/d = 4, in which the packing structure regularity from the wall extents over the entire bed. Accordingly, much uniform flow velocity and temperature distributions were observed in the bed. Finally, some literature results in the range of 1