Computational Fluid Dynamics
Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT)
Institute of Fluid Mechanics
Central receiver systems (CRS) are a promising technique for transforming solar power into electricity. In collaboration with KIT Campus North, where a small-scale test facility of a CRS using liquid metals (LMs) as the heat transfer fluid is build up (SOMMER), numerical simulations of the turbulent heat transfer within the receiver tube are to be performed. As the heat transfer mechanism in liquid metals is much different than in air or water, since for LMs conduction is much more important, conventional turbulence models fail to accurately capture the physical processes involved. Hence, direct numerical simulations of low Reynolds number flows and large eddy simulations of moderate Reynolds number flows are necessary to capture the underlying physics. One objective is to provide high-fidelity reference data to tune RANS models. However, also more fundamental questions about the heat transfer mechanisms, selection of appropriate types of boundary conditions, and the effect of the non-homogeneous thermal boundary conditions are to be studied.