Periodic heat transfer characteristics of additively manufactured lattices

Abstract

In the present study, the flow and heat transfer characteristics of lattices with four different unit cell topologies, namely, (a) Octet, (b) FD-Cube, (c) Tetrakaidecahedron (TKD), and (d) Cube were investigated with air as the working fluid. All the samples had the designed porosity of ∼ 0.88 and unit cell size of 10 mm. The distribution of local heat transfer coefficient revealed that depending on the unit cell topology, the flow became thermally developed after travelling over five or six rows of unit cells in streamwise direction. The heat transfer coefficient values in thermally developed zones were similar for Octet, FD-Cube and TKD. Overall heat transfer coefficient provided by Octet, FD-Cube, and TKD was in the range of ∼216 W/m2K to 415W/m2K and Cube yielded the lowest heat transfer coefficient values between 167W/m2K and 290 W/m2K.Three different characteristic length scales, viz. (a) channel hydraulic diameter, (b) pore-diameter, and (c) fiber-diameter were used to define the Nusselt number. The usage of pore-scale dimensions such as pore-diameter and fiber-diameter provided a very coherent data set for Nusselt number of all the topologies which helped in deriving a single correlation for predicting the thermal performance. The lattices provided heat transfer augmentation of 10-20 times higher than the smooth channel counterparts. Amongst all the investigated topologies, FD-Cube incurred the highest and Cube yielded the lowest pressure drop. It was also observed that convective heat transfer coefficients obtained for different lattices can be conveniently reported in Nusselt number forms with pore diameter and/or fiber diameters as reference length scales, where such Nusselt numbers for different lattice configurations converges to a single trendline when plotted against Reynolds numbers (also based on same reference length scales). We have provided a single correlation for Nusselt numbers as a function of Reynolds numbers which fits all the lattice configurations studied here. Finally, the thermal-hydraulic performance of lattices is reported which had similar magnitude levels for all the investigated topologies and a single correlation has been proposed for THP covering all the configurations of present study. The investigated topologies provided THP of ∼ 3 at the lowest investigated Reynolds number.