A detailed comparison of heat transfer and fluid dynamics in Voronoi foam and triply periodic minimal surfaces (TPMS) via pore-scale investigation

Abstract

In this study, the OpenFOAM library is employed to perform pore-scale simulations (PSS) to compare the flow and heat transfer characteristics of triply periodic minimal surfaces (TPMS) samples including Diamond, Gyroid, Lidinoid, and Split-P with those of a Voronoi foam (VF) sample. Conjugate heat transfer is simulated to ensure a comprehensive comparison. The samples are heated by a constant temperature heat source of 350 K at the bottom of the solid region. Numerical simulations are conducted in the non-Darcy regime for samples with identical thickness and the same porosity of 0.7. The outcomes revealed that the Voronoi sample had a lower pressure drop compared to the TPMS samples, while the Diamond sample, which had the lowest pressure drop among the TPMS samples, led to a 33 % higher pressure loss compared to VF at an inlet velocity of 0.1 m/s. Thermal analysis revealed that all TPMS samples except for Lidinoid outperformed Voronoi in heat transfer performance. For simultaneous thermal and flow evaluation, the performance evaluation criterion (PEC), defined as the ratio of improved heat transfer to enhanced power consumption, indicated the superior overall performance of VF among all studied cases. Diamond exhibited the closest performance to Voronoi among the four TPMS structures.