Tomographic Characterization of a Semitransparent-Particle Packed Bed and Determination of its Thermal Radiative Properties

Abstract

A two-phase medium consisting of densely packed large nonspherical semitransparent particles in a transparent fluid is considered. Its 3D digital geometry is obtained by computer tomography and employed to numerically calculate its porosity, specific surface, pore and particle size distributions, and the representative elementary volume for continuum domain. The collision-based Monte Carlo method is applied to calculate the probability distribution functions for attenuation path length and direction of incidence at the fluid-solid interface for each phase, which, in turn, are used to derive the extinction and scattering coefficients and the scattering phase functions. The methodology is applied to a packed bed of CaCO3 particles, used in industrially relevant high-temperature processes. Spectral and directional dependencies of the radiative properties are analyzed.