Experimental Investigation of Heat Transfer and Pressure Drop in Porous Metal Foams

Metal foams made by the SlipReactionFoamSintering (SRFS)-process are investigated. In these foams the pores are produced by a reaction between iron and a weak acid. The generated hydrogen forms pores in a metal powder slurry. These pores remain in the foam after sintering. Also secondary pores are found in these foams because of the sintering of the metal powder slurry. The metal powder base of the foams is Inconel 625 and Hastelloy B. Foam samples with a variety of different porosities of the two metals in the range of about 62% to 87% are used as well as samples made out of sintered metal powder which were not foamed with porosities of around 50%. The motivation for this study is to use these foams as combustion chamber walls in gas fired power plants. By using porous walls effusion cooling can be applied to keep the wall temperatures low. Air is used as a fluid to study the flow characteristics of these samples. Their pressure drop with air at room temperature is measured in the range of velocities of up to around 1 m/s. The parameters characterizing the foams are obtained using the Darcy-Forchheimer equations resulting in the permeability and the inertial coefficients. The dependency on the porosity is discussed. The volumetric heat transfer is measured for the foams by a transient method based on an air flow with a sinusoidal temperature wave, which is attenuated by the sample. The obtained volumetric heat transfer coefficients are discussed and transferred to Nu-Re correlations. Correlations between the heat transfer coefficients and the pressure drop coefficients are made.