Validation of a CFD model for prediction of the efficiency of evaporative cooling in porous panels

Abstract

In regions with warm tropical and subtropical climates elevated air temperatures, especially during the dry seasons, can negatively affect thermal comfort inside installations used for animal and vegetative production, causing a significant decrease in production. An evaporative cooling system using non-saturated air to be introduced in the environment was employed, forcing air passage through different moist porous materials with the intention of thermal cooling, to improve the internal environment of these installations. However, difficulties in field experimentation have drastically limited the amount of information available regarding new porous materials that could possibly be used to substitute conventional material which is patented, expensive and with low durability. Therefore, the objective of the present study was to validate a computational model in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to predict cooling efficiency (h) in moist porous pads construed of expanded clay. The numerical results obtained by the proposed model showed good correlation (81%) with the experimental data, indicating its suitability to predict the behavior of these types of systems and for other porous material.