EXPERIMENTAL AND NUMERICAL INVESTIGATION OF THE EFFECT OF ALUMINUM POROUS FINS ON HEAT TRANSFER

OpenAlex İngilizce

Thermal management of electronic devices is an essential issue as it affects the function and longevity of the components. In this paper, aluminum porous fins mounted on a surface in a rectangular channel for three bypass ratios arrayed in inline and staggered arrangements, three thicknesses, as well as pore densities were investigated experimentally and numerically. The heat removal and pressure drop characteristics of the aluminum foam-filled horizontal channel were examined for different Reynolds numbers. The numerical study was developed using the COMSOL Multiphysics software and the outcomes of the developed simulation model were validated using the experimental results. As a result of the study, it was observed that the insertion of aluminum foams inside the channel increased the Nusselt number, and that the staggered configuration improved heat transfer approximately 6.49 times compared to an empty channel. Similarly, the pressure drop was increased by 11.2 times. The staggered fin configuration provided higher heat transfer performance compared to the inline configuration. For fin profiles with the constant fin volume, as the fin thickness increased, the pressure drop also increased, along with the Nusselt number. However, as the thickness increased, the increase in ΔP was greater than the increase in Nu, leading to the lowest thermal efficiency factor η value for the fin with a thickness of ts = 90 mm. In the studied Reynolds range, with the increase in Re, both Nu and ΔP vary proportionally with the PPI ratio of the aluminum foam fins.