An experimental and numerical study on thermal performance of a regenerator system with ceramic honeycomb

The aim of this paper is to perform the experiment and the numerical simulation for investigating the heat transfer in a regenerator system with ceramic honeycomb and to suggest a useful correlation for optimization of the regenerator system. For achieving this, the effects of some parameters were investigated, e. g., switching time, cell size and length of honeycomb on the mean temperature efficiency. The measured temperatures by R-type thermocouples were compared with the predictions by means of the commercial package, STAR-CD. A useful correlation for thermal efficiency was newly proposed as a function of the normalized switching time, defined in terms of switching time, cell size and length of honeycomb. The results showed that the thermal efficiency is above 90% and the normalized heat exchange rate is higher than 80% when the normalized switching time is less than 1000.