Dependence of Heat Transfer Coefficient on Porous Structure in Porous Media

Abstract

Detailed heat transfer characteristics of particle-sintered porous media and metal foams are evaluated to specify the important structural parameters suitable for high heat removal. The porous media used in this experiment are particle-sintered porous media made of bronze and SUS316L, and metal foams made of copper and nickel. Cooling water flows into the porous medium opposite to heat flux input loaded by a plasma arcjet. The result indicates that the bronze-particle porous medium of 100μm in pore size shows the highest performance and achieves heat transfer coefficient of 0.035MW/m2K at inlet heat flux 4.6MW/m2. Compared with the heat transfer performance of copper fiber-sintered porous media, the bronze particlesintered ones give lower heat transfer coefficient. However, the stable cooling conditions that the heat transfer coefficient does not depend on the flow velocity, were confirmed even at heat flux of 4.6MW/m2 in case of the bronze particle-sintered media, while not in the case of the copper-fiber sintered media. This signifies the possibility that the bronze-particle sintered media enable much higher heat flux removal of over 10MW/m2, which could be caused by higher permeability of the particle-sintered pore structures. Porous media with high permeability provide high performance of vapor evacuation, which leads to more stable heat removal even under extremely high heat flux. On the other hand, the heat transfer coefficient of the metal foams becomes lower because of the lower capillary and fin effects caused by too high porosity and low effective thermal conductivity. It is concluded that the pore structure having high performance of vapor evacuation as well as the high capillary and high fin effects is appropriate for extremely high heat flux removal of over 10MW/m2.