Experimental Study of Aluminum Metal Foam Material on Heat Transfer Performance 2021-26-0239

Electrification is one of the megatrends across the industries, like electric vehicles, electric aircraft, etc. which needs advancement in power electronics component technology. As technology advances in miniaturization of power electronics, thermal-management issues threaten to limit the performance of these devices. These may force designers to derate the device performance and ultimately these compromise in design may increase the size & weight of the application. One of the technologies capable of accomplishing these goals employs a class of materials know as metal foam.

Metal foams are lightweight cellular materials inspired by nature. The main application of metal foams can be grouped into structural and functional and are based on several excellent properties of the material. Structural applications take advantage of the light-weight and specific mechanical properties of metal foam. Functional applications are based on a special functionality, i.e. a large open area in combination with very good thermal conductivity for heat dissipation.

This paper reports the results of an experimental investigation on the heat transfer performance of metal foam and solid metal under forces & natural convection. Experiments have been conducted with aluminum metal foams in two different pore densities and solid aluminum using air as fluid medium. Pore densities of metal foam used for experiments are 10PPI & 20PPI. Experiments are performed for two different flow rates using two speed fan and two power rating (heat load) using heating coil as source. Thermocouple were placed at heat source side and on opposite side of samples to effectively measure the surface temperature. Surface temperature of samples are measured and compared for all the samples. Experiment results shows that same thermal response can be achieved with 50% smaller size of foam as compared to solid aluminum along with weight benefit (~5x) under forced convection.