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ISSN Online: 2379-1748

ISBN Flash Drive: 978-1-56700-469-4

ISBN Online: 978-1-56700-470-0

Second Thermal and Fluids Engineering Conference
April, 2-5, 2017, Las Vegas, NV, USA

Thermal-Hydraulic Performance of Aluminum Foam Heat Exchangers with Varying Cellular Lattice Structures

Get access (open in a dialog) pages 645-648
DOI: 10.1615/TFEC2017.cfa.018116

摘要

Due to their large surface area to volume ratio, low density, and high strength structure, aluminum metal foams offer a promising application for heat exchangers. One significant design challenge of aluminum foam heat exchangers is optimizing the trade-off between heat transfer performance and pressure drop (i.e., pumping power). Previous experimental investigations successfully quantified the thermal hydraulic behavior of such heat exchangers based on foam porosity, but provide limited insight on the effects of varying cellular lattice structures within their samples. As a result, a CFD analysis using Star CCM+ is carried out for the thermal hydraulic behavior of aluminum foam heat exchangers made of 8 × 8 × 8 lattices based on relative density, unit cell geometry, and unit cell orientation. The k-ε model is utilized with applied boundary conditions taken from experiment data to describe the turbulent flow through the heat exchanger. A Grid Convergence Index (GCI) method is used for all models to estimate the discretization error for verification. Numerical results are compared to the experimental data for validation, and the samples are quantified and ranked based on thermal hydraulic performance.