Abstract
In recent years, in order to counteract the growth of environmental pollution and the contemporary scarcity of various energy sources, researchers have proposed innovative and efficient solutions for heat transfer applications. Extended surfaces, which can involve the use of fins, open cell metal foams, etc., have been demonstrated to be promising solutions. Open cell metal foams consist of structs intersecting at nodes resulting in stochastic oriented cells. Periodic metal foams have also attracted great interest. These structures are made of a single cell unit periodically replicated. Kelvin cells and Weaire–Phelan ones are two conventional elementary unit cells. In this paper, a numerical model is developed and validated, aiming at analysing the thermal and hydraulic behaviors of modified Kelvin cell-based metal foams during air forced convection. Constant porosity (0.9) and pore density (40 PPI) were adopted. Five different geometrical configurations (one cylindrical and four elliptical) and four orientations (0–15–30–45°) of the struts with respect to the main air flow direction were investigated. The inlet air velocities varied between 0.5 and 4 m s−1. Interesting results were obtained and discussed in terms of pressure drops, heat transfer coefficients, and pumping power per area density.
Highlights
In the last years, open cell metal foams have been extensively investigated [1]
Extended surfaces, which can involve the use of fins, open cell metal foams, etc., have been demonstrated to be promising solutions
Open cell metal foams consist of structs intersecting at nodes resulting in stochastic oriented cells
Summary
Open cell metal foams have been extensively investigated [1]. Metal foams are cellular structured materials consisting of stochastically oriented open cells. If compared to the compact-plate heat exchanger with empty channels, the foamed one presented heat transfer coefficients which increased from 3.5 to 5.1 times and pressure drops from 3.2 to 5.7 times From this brief overview, stochastic open cell foams can potentially improve the thermal performance in air forced convection as compared to other extended surfaces. Cunsolo et al [22] adopted the Lord Kelvin and Weaire–Phelan models to find a simple geometric approximation of an open cell to describe convective heat transfer and pressure drop. It was stated that the simplest Lord Kelvin cells did not affect the solution accuracy significantly As it was affirmed for stochastic open cell foams, geometrical parameters influence the thermo fluid dynamic performance even of the structured porous media. Moon et al [27] studied pressure drop and heat transfer performance of Kelvin cell-based foams with circular and elliptical struts. Focusing on the thermal performance, uniform results were not obtained, and these are accurately discussed
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