Natural Convection Through High Porosity Metal Foams—A Numerical Study

Abstract

Numerical analysis of natural convection through highly porous metal foams attached to the aluminium plates is performed in this study. A heater sandwiched between two aluminium plates attached with aluminium metal foams of different pores per inch (PPI) is considered for the present analysis. Initially, experiments are carried out for aluminium plate-heater assembly for different heat inputs. In the numerical investigation, the aluminium plates are attached with metal foams on either side for further analysis. A well-known Darcy extended Forchheimer flow and LTNE thermal models are considered for the metal foam in the computations. The natural convection is modelled using Boussinesq approximation. Initially, the numerical result for the plate without metal foam is validated with the experimental results for different heat inputs. The results show that the Nusselt number decreases with the increase of metal foam pore density (PPI) and increases with the increase in Rayleigh number. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.