The effect of local thermal nonequilibrium on conduction in metal foam tube heat exchanger with a uniform heat source

Abstract

The effect of local thermal nonequilibrium on the steady state heat conduction in metal foam tube heat exchanger as a porous layer in the presence of internal heat generated by considering the thermal conductivity coefficient as a function of temperature was investigated. A two temperature model is investigated by using reconstruction of variational iteration method (RVIM). The obtained results from RVIM are compared with the numerical results of Maple. These comparisons reveal that RVIM is a very powerful and precise approach to solve nonlinear ordinary differential equations and there is a good agreement between them. In this study, the effects of porosity and internal heat generation on the temperature distribution in the solid and liquid phases are presented.