Effect of thickness and thermal conductivity of metal foams filled in a vertical channel – a numerical study

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to discuss about the two-dimensional numerical simulations of fluid flow and heat transfer through high thermal conductivity metal foams filled in a vertical channel using the commercial software ANSYS FLUENT.

Design/methodology/approach

The Darcy Extended Forchheirmer model is considered for the metal foam region to evaluate the flow characteristics and the local thermal non-equilibrium heat transfer model is considered for the heat transfer analysis; thus the resulting problem becomes conjugate heat transfer.

Findings

Results obtained based on the present simulations are validated with the experimental results available in literature and the agreement was found to be good. Parametric studies reveal that the Nusselt number increases in the presence of porous medium with increasing thickness but the effect because of the change in thermal conductivity was found to be insignificant. The results of heat transfer for the metal foams filled in the vertical channel are compared with the clear channel in terms of Colburn j factor and performance factor.

Practical implications

This paper serves as the current relevance in electronic cooling so as to open up more parametric and optimization studies to develop new class of materials for the enhancement of heat transfer.

Originality/value

The novelty of the present study is to quantify the effect of metal foam thermal conductivity and thickness on the performance of heat transfer and hydrodynamics of the vertical channel for an inlet velocity range of 0.03-3 m/s.

Citation

Kotresha, B. and Gnanasekaran, N. (2019), "Effect of thickness and thermal conductivity of metal foams filled in a vertical channel – a numerical study", International Journal of Numerical Methods for Heat & Fluid Flow, Vol. 29 No. 1, pp. 184-203. https://doi.org/10.1108/HFF-11-2017-0465