A. Alrudhan and G. Bognár 1
Institute of Machine and Product Design, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Informatics, University of Miskolc, 3515-Egyetemváros, Miskolc, Hungary
Received 7 August, 2025; accepted in revised form 31 October, 2025
Abstract: A computational fluid dynamics investigation of porous metal foam fully filling a horizontal pipe was conducted to optimize the balance between thermal and hydraulic performance. The study examined six different models of aluminium metal foam, which featured both dual and uniform permeability configurations. The dual permeability setup featured porous metal foam arranged in series with uniform dimensions. The pore density of metal foam varies from 10 to 20 PPI and its porosity is 0.9, 0.92, and 0.94. The Darcy-Extend Forchheimer model was used for flow dynamics within the porous region. The local thermal non-equilibrium (LTNE) model was applied within the porous filled region of the pipe to analyze heat transfer characteristics. The results showed that the thermal performance of the dual permeability structure (model 5 and 6) was better than the uniform permeability structure (models 1, 2, 3, and 4). The combination of 10 PPI and 30 PPI in a dual permeability series structure was found to optimize thermal performance, while the combination of 20 PPI and 30 PPI optimized hydraulic performance across all mass flux values. The average wall temperature, average Nusselt number and friction coefficient were also computed to determine the optimal performance.
© European Society of Computational Methods in Sciences and Engineering
Keywords: Heat flow, Metal foam, Porous media, Dual permeability
Mathematics Subject Classification: 80A20
PACS: 44.10.+i, 47.56.+r, 44.05.+e