Forced convection heat transfer enhancement by porous pin fins in rectangular channels

The forced convective heat transfer in three-dimensional porous pin fin channels is numerically studied in this paper. The Forchheimer-Brinkman extended Darcy model and two-equation energy model are adopted to describe the flow and heat transfer in porous media. Air and water are employed as the cold fluids and the effects of Reynolds number (Re), pore density (PPI) and pin fin form are studied in detail. The results show that, with proper selection of physical parameters, significant heat transfer enhancements and pressure drop reductions can be achieved simultaneously with porous pin fins and the overall heat transfer performances in porous pin fin channels are much better than those in traditional solid pin fin channels. The effects of pore density are significant. As PPI increases, the pressure drops and heat fluxes in porous pin fin channels increase while the overall heat transfer efficiencies decrease and the maximal overall heat transfer efficiencies are obtained at PPI=20 for both air and water cases. Furthermore, the effects of pin fin form are also remarkable. With the same physical parameters, the overall heat transfer efficiencies in the long elliptic porous pin fin channels are the highest while they are the lowest in the short elliptic porous pin fin channels.