Flows in metal foams using Immersed Boundary Method

Porous media are nowadays common in many thermal or mechanical engineering applications such as heat exchangers. A recent example of such porous media used in engineering is metal foams. These foams increase thermal transfer thanks to their enhanced exchange surface (high surface to volume ratio) while staying light-weighted. However, due to the complexity of the geometry of these foams the flow characterisation at the pore-level is challenging. In addition, turbulence might also play an important role inside the porous metal foams and affect both the fluid flow and particle transport. The aim of this paper is to investigate the suitability of Immersed Boundary (IB) method for the simulation of flows in metal foams. For that purpose, the IB approach is compared against a standard CFD solver based on a Body-Fitted (BF) grid and against experimental data. First a flow around a cylinder from Reynolds numbers (Re) = 20 up to 700 is considered to compare present BF and IB results against experimental results. The simulations on different pore shapes are also performed, as the geometry gets closer to a real metal foam implying a better prediction of the different velocity profiles and fluctuations.