UC Riverside

The effect of using metal foams in double-pipe heat exchangers is investigated in this work. The advantages and drawbacks of using metal foams in these types of heat exchangers is characterized and quantified. The analysis starts with an investigation of forced convection in metal foam filled heat exchangers using Brinkman Forchheimer extended Darcy model and the Local Thermal Equilibrium (LTE) energy model. An excellent agreement is displayed between the present results and established analytical results. The presented work enables one to establish the optimum conditions for the use of metal foam filled double pipe heat exchangers.