Evaluation of free convection cooling and entropy efficiency in a porous W-shaped cavity using RSM and CFD approaches

Abstract

The cooling and entropy efficiencies of natural convection inside cavities within fully saturated metal foam play a vital role in thermal engineering applications systems. The current study employed response surface methodology (RSM) coupled with ANSYS FLUENT-CFD for a two-dimensional W-shaped cavity, which has not been examined previously. Several effective physical factors were considered, including the aspect ratio (W = h/H = 0, 0.2, 0.4, 0.6 and 0.8) and the applied temperature variation (ΔT = Th − Tc = 10, 20, 30 and 40 K). Additionally, the thermal performance (NumW/NumO and QW/QO ) and entropy generation (EGW/EGO ) improved under the optimum design of pore per inch (10 ≤ PPI ≤ 30), the number of wave amplitude (1 ≤ n ≤ 3) and aspect ratio (0.2 ≤ W ≤ 0.8) utilizing both RSM and CFD. The results showed that the optimal design of natural convection within a fully saturated metal foam W-shaped cavity at PPI = 10, n = 3 and W = 0.8 resulted in enhancements of approximately 2.875 times for both NumW/NumO and QW/QO while maintaining reasonable EGW/EGO at 1.193 times. Moreover, the novelty aspect of this research lies in the successful achievement of multi-objectives improving NumW/NumO , QW/QO and EGW/EGO by applying the RSM approach in combination with ANSYS FLUENT-CFD. Thus, the optimal working procedure of RSM and CFD is aligned with the desired goals, as the cooling and entropy efficiencies of the porous W-shaped cavity are considered acceptable and satisfactory.