The effective pore diameter of a three-dimensional numerical model for Estimating heat and fluid flow characteristics in metal foams

Abstract

A three-dimensional numerical model is proposed to determine heat and fluid flow characteristics in metal foams. A series of full three-dimensional numerical calculations was performed to reveal complex three-dimensional velocity, pressure and temperature fields within three-dimensional porous structures of the metal foams. These numerical results are processed to obtain the macroscopic characteristics such as the permeability, inertia, dispersion and interstitial heat transfer coefficients. An effective pore diameter concept has been proposed to correlate the resulting heat and fluid flow characteristics with available empirical correlations. © Kuwahara and Fumoto; Licensee Bentham Open.