Enhanced Forced Convection through Thin Metal Foams Placed in Rectangular Ducts

This study reports a parametric numerical investigation to elucidate the thermal-hydraulic performance of metal foam for cooling applications. In this study, both spanwise and streamwise size of metal foams having high porosity value of similar to 0.95 is varied, along with the solid-phase thermal conductivity and pore-density of metal foams, for both air and water as working fluid flowing at different Reynolds number. Thinner foams (in spanwise) and shorter foams (in streamwise) were found to have highest convective heat transfer coefficient at a certain pumping power, with water-based configurations yielding similar to 10 times more heat dissipation at a certain pressure drop when compared to air-based configurations.