Heat Sink Cooling with a Porous Medium

Heat Sink Cooling with a Porous Medium — ANSYS Fluent CFD Simulation

Description

This project simulates fluid flow inside a porous medium for heat sink cooling using ANSYS Fluent. The study of fluid flow in porous media is one of the most widely used fields in science: a porous medium consists mostly of perforated materials containing pores and void spaces within itself. Here, a porous aluminum foam in contact with a heat source acts as a heat sink — the fluid flows through the foam and absorbs heat from it, and the large internal surface area of the porous structure makes it an effective cooling element. Within the Porous Media: Beginner CFD Training Package, this project applies porous-media heat transfer to a practical cooling device, building on the porous chamber toward a real heat-sink application.

Methodology

The model is designed in three dimensions using Design Modeler. The geometry consists of a hollow section that acts as an inlet, followed by a porous aluminum foam in contact with a heat source. The mesh, generated in ANSYS Meshing, is structured with a total of 7,680 cells. The porous medium is in contact with the heat source, and the whole setup acts as a heat sink. The flow enters through the inlet boundary at a velocity of 1.99 m/s and a temperature of 300 K, then passes through the porous medium to absorb heat from it. The energy model is activated, and the RNG k-epsilon model with the standard wall function is used for the fluid flow analysis.

Analysis

At the end of the solution process, the temperature, velocity, and pressure fields are obtained, along with the streamlines and velocity vectors. As the pressure contour shows, the flow pressure behind the porous medium differs significantly from that at the outlet boundary, owing to the resistance the porous medium imposes on the flow. From these results you can follow how the fluid moves through the aluminum foam, how it absorbs heat from the source, and how the porous resistance shapes the pressure field. By the end of this project, you'll be able to set up a porous-medium heat-sink simulation with an activated energy model, represent a metal foam as a porous zone in contact with a heat source, and interpret the temperature, velocity, and pressure results that characterize porous-media cooling.