Fluid flow and scalar transport through porous fins

Abstract

Lotus-type porous metals are a promising alternative for compact heat transfer applications. In lotus-type porous fins, jet impingement and transverse mixing play important roles for heat transfer: jets emerging from the pores impinge on the following fin and enhance heat transfer performance, while the transverse fluid motion advects heat away from the fin surface. By means of magnetic resonance imaging we have performed mean flow and scalar transport measurements through scaled-up replicas of two kinds of lotus-type porous fins: one with a deterministic hole pattern and staggered alignment, and one with a random hole pattern, but the same porosity and mean pore diameter. The choice of geometric parameters (fin spacing, thickness, porosity, and hole diameter) is based on previous thermal studies. The Reynolds number based on the mean pore diameter and inner velocity ranges from 80 to 3800. The measurements show that in the random hole pattern the jet characteristic length scale is substantially larger with respect to the staggered hole pattern. The random geometry also produces long coherent vortices aligned with the streamwise direction, which improves the transverse mixing. The random hole distribution causes the time mean streamlines to meander in a random-walk manner, and the diffusivity coefficient associated to the mechanical dispersion (which is nominally zero in the staggered hole configuration) is several times larger than the fluid molecular diffusivity at the higher Reynolds numbers. From the trends in maximum streamwise velocity, streamwise vorticity, and mechanical diffusivity, it is inferred that the flow undergoes a transition to an unsteady/turbulent regime around Reynolds number 300. This is supported by the measurements of concentration of an isokinetic non-buoyant plume of scalar injected upstream of the stack of fins. The total scalar diffusivity for the fully turbulent regime is found to be 22 times larger than the molecular diffusivity, but only 6 times higher than the mechanical diffusivity, indicating that the latter plays a significant role for heat transfer and mixing.