Review on Processing and Fluid Transport in Porous Metals with a Focus on Bottleneck Structures

Abstract

The dynamics of fluid in porous metals has earned growing attention due to the increasing worldwide research and technological advancement in harnessing, processing and the use of materials. In this study, a review on the wide range of different structures that metal foams can show, the range of processing methods that can be used to make them, leading to these different structures and their fluid flow behaviour are presented herein. The fluid section of this investigation covers fluid flow models, boundary conditions, permeability and Form drag estimations, Reynolds number and friction factor determinations, state-of-the-art knowledge of experimental and predictive results. It is the hope that the extended review on processing and fluid flow across monomodal “bottleneck” metallic structures covered herein would lend itself useful to the processing of enhanced bimodal “bottleneck” structures for fluid flow application.