Study of the Thermal and Hydraulic Performance of Porous Block versus Gyroid Structure: Experimental and Numerical Approaches

Abstract

Various researchers in the field of engineering have used porous media for many years. The present paper studies heat enhancement using two different types of porous media. In the first type, porous metal foam media was used experimentally and numerically for heat extraction. The porous medium was replaced with a porous structure using the Gyroid model and the triply periodic minimum surfaces technique in the second type. The Darcy–Brinkman model combined with the energy equation was used for the first type, whereas Navier–Stokes equations with the energy equation were implemented for the second type. The uniqueness of this approach was that it treated the Gyroid as a solid structure in the model. The two types were tested for different heat fluxes and different flow rates. A comparison between the experimental measurements and the numerical solution provided a good agreement. By comparing the performance of the two types of structure, the Gyroid structure outperformed the metal foam for heat extraction and uniformity of the temperature distribution. Despite an 18% increase in the pressure drop in the presence of the Gyroid structure, the performance evaluation criteria for the Gyroid are more significant when compared to metal foam.