Pore-level CFD Investigation of the Permeability and Form Drag of "Structural-Adapted" Porous Metals

Abstract

The transport of fluid in porous metallic structures is of considerable interest due to their unique and combined characteristics of high surface area and large pore volume, enabling their suitability as energy and impact loading material. This work present a combined utilization of image processing and pore-level computational fluid dynamics modeling and simulation of fluid flow across "real" and geometrically - adapted commercial foams. Pore-structure related and flow properties of the porous structure were obtained using the combined techniques with reasonable correlation of experimentally derived values. This work tends to study the behavior of fluid dynamics in structural adapted high porous metals by dilating the skeletal phases. Real samples of porous metals were dilated and the porosity (ε) in % were as follows: for Inconel 450µm Real the porosity was 83.54% it was dilated twice and the results obtained were: DL1-70.54%, DL-2 57.50%. RCM-NCX1116 real the porosity was 89.81% with dilated porosities of DL1-79.97%, DL2-71.64%, DL3-62.85%. Porvair7PPI real was 89.69% the dilated results were: DL1-85.83%, DL2-82.03%, DL3-78.05% respectively. The modelling approach used herein could assist in the design of efficient porous metal foams for fluid transport application.