Abstract
This study addresses the influence of pore size variation on the effective thermal conductivity of open-cell foam structures. Numerical design procedure which renders it possible to control chosen structural parameters has been developed based on characterization of commercially available open-cell copper foams. Open-porous materials with various pore size distribution were numerically designed using the Laguerre–Voronoi Tessellations procedure. Heat transfer through an isolated structure was simulated with the finite element method. The results reveal that thermal conductivity is strongly related to porosity, which is in agreement with the literature. The influence of pore size distribution has also been observed and compared with analytical formulas proposed in the literature.
Highlights
Thermal conductivity is an essential factor in designing open-porous materials applied in heat transfer devices such as cross-flow heat exchangers, catalytic converters, electrodes of high-temperature fuel cells or solar collectors [1,2,3]
We used Laguerre–Voronoi tessellations and the finite element method to study the influence of microstructural characteristics: porosity and pore volume distribution, on the effective thermal
We used Laguerre–Voronoi tessellations and the finite element method to study the influence of conductivity in open-cell porous materials
Summary
Thermal conductivity is an essential factor in designing open-porous materials applied in heat transfer devices such as cross-flow heat exchangers, catalytic converters, electrodes of high-temperature fuel cells or solar collectors [1,2,3]. Additional advantage can be observed in terms of permeability, especially compared to packed bed, frequently utilized in catalytic converters and thermal energy storage devices, where it incurs a large pressure drop throughflow. The most commonly used methods for manufacturing of commercial foam materials are: It turns out that, despite their random structure, a set of macroscopic properties of porous structures can be modeled with sufficient accuracy with the use of regular geometry. Experimental observations, clearly indicate the distribution of pore size [13] and sometimes anisotropy in real materials, which makes such simplified models insufficiently accurate. In order to increase consistency of models with real materials, other approaches for simulating properties of porous materials have been
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