Author(s)

Khaled S. Al-Athel ¹, Moayed Al-Harbi ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ Mechanical Engineering Department, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals, Dhahran,Saudi Arabia 31261

Corresponding Author

Khaled S. Al-Athel

ABSTRACT

Metal foams are very attractive materials for thermal and electronic packaging applications due to their improved heat transfer capabilities. Their improved heat transfer effective properties are due to the relatively large contact area they possess because of their cell structure. This comes at the expense of the pressure drop. This work presents a methodology based on μ-CT scan to develop a realistic metal foam 3D model. The model is validated with experiments and used to study the behavior of the metal foam as a fin in terms of the temperature variation within the fin as well as the effect of the airflow velocity and fin orientation to the pressure drop. Results showed two major observations. First, this methodology could be used to identify a velocity value at which the fin orientation becomes obsolete and has no effect on the temperature variation. Second, the pressure drop alone could not be used to assess the fin, but also the fin orientation has to be taken into account to examine the total pressure drop. 

KEYWORDS

Metal Foam, Fin, micro-CT scan, CFD, Convective Heat Transfer.

CITE THIS PAPER

Khaled S. Al-Athel, Moayed Al-Harbi. (2017) Effect of Fin Orientation and Forced Convection on the Performance of Metal Foam Fins using a μ-CT Scan Based 3D CFD Model. Matallic foams (2017) Vol.1, Num. 1: 1-14.

REFERENCES

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