| High porosity metal foams are excellent candidates for high heat dissipation. They are employed in aerospace applications mainly, but their use has been widened to include cooling in Electronic Packaging. Other important applications have been found taking advantage of the thermal properties of the metal foam. These applications include compact heat exchangers for airborne equipment, regenerative and dissipative air-cooled condenser towers, and compact heat sinks for power electronics. The low relative density, open porosity and high thermal conductivity of the cell edges, as well as the large accessible surface area per unit volume, and the ability to mix the cooling fluid, all make metal foam heat exchangers efficient, compact and light weight. The purpose of this work is to provide an analytical model to determine the two-dimensional temperature distribution in open cell metal foams when they are used in a forced convective heat transfer mode. The analysis uses the typical parameters reported by the foam manufacturers such as the porosity and the area density, defined as the ratio of the surface area of the foam to the volume. The simplicity and applicability of the present approach offer a significant advantage over previous models. It eliminates the need for complex microscopic analytical or numerical modeling of the flow and the heat transfer in and around the pores. The correlations obtained experimentally through this research also have a great importance in the model proposed. |
