Experimental Investigation of Heat Transfer Enhancement Through Array Jet Impingement on Various Configurations of High Porosity Thin Metal Foams

High porosity metal foams are known for providing high heat transfer rates, as they provide significant increase in wetted surface area as well as highly tortuous flow paths to coolant flowing over fibers. Further, jet impingement is also known to offer high convective cooling, particularly on the footprints of the jets on the target to be cooled. Jet impingement, however, leads to large special gradients in heat transfer coefficient, leading to increased thermal stresses. In this study, we have tried to use high porosity thin metal foams subjected to array jet impingement, for a special crossflow scheme. One aim of using metal foams is to achieve cooling uniformity also, which is tough to achieve for impingement cooling. High porosity (92.65%) and high pore density (40 pores per inch, 3 mm thick) foams have been used as heat transfer enhancement agents. In order to reduce the pumping power requirements imposed by full metal foam design, we developed two striped metal foam configurations. For that, the jets were arranged in 3 × 6 array (x/d = 3.42, y/d = 2), such that the crossflow is dominantly sideways. This crossflow scheme allowed usage of thin stripes, where in one configuration we studied direct impingement onto stripes of metal foam and in the other, we studied impingement onto metal and crossflow interacted with metal foams. Steady state heat transfer experiments have been conducted for a jet plate configuration with varying jet-to-target plate distance z/d = 0.75, 2 and 4. The baseline case was jet impingement onto a smooth target surface. Jet diameter-based Reynolds number was varied between 3000 to 11000. Enhancement in heat transfer due to impingement onto thin metal foams has been evaluated against the enhancement in pumping power requirements. For a specific case of z/d = 0.75 with the base surface fully covered with metal foam, metal foams have enhanced heat transfer by 2.42 times for a concomitant pressure drop penalty of 1.67 times over the flow range tested.