Institute of Fundamental Technological Research

The unique properties of ceramic foams make them well suited to a range of applications in science and engineering such as heat transfer, reaction catalysis, flow stabilization, and filtration. Consequently, a detailed understanding of the transport properties (i.e. permeability, pressure drop) of these foams is essential. This paper presents the results of both numerical and experimental investigations of the morphology and pressure drop in 10 ppi (pores per inch), 20 ppi and 30 ppi ceramic foam specimens with porosity in the range of 75–79%. The numerical simulations were carried out using a GPU implementation of the three-dimensional, multiple-relaxation-time lattice Boltzmann method (MRT-LBM) on geometries of up to 360 million nodes in size. The experiments were undertaken using a water channel. Foam morphology (porosity and specific surface area) was studied on post-processed, computed tomography (CT) images, and the sensitivity of these results to CT image thresholding was also investigated. Comparison of the numerical and experimental data for pressure drop exhibited very good agreement. Additionally, the results of this study were verified against other researchers׳ data and correlations, with varying outcomes.

Ceramic foam, Pressure drop, Lattice Boltzmann method, Darcy–Forchheimer equation, Specific surface area, Pore-scale simulation

Linear stability of the flow through the transversely corrugated channel with flat sidewalls is investigated numerically. Two variants of the wall corrugation are considered: symmetric sinusoidal waviness of the top and bottom walls and onesided corrugation, i.e., one of the walls remains flat. Spectrally accurate Galerkin method formulated in a transformed domain is used for the solution of the main flow and linear stability equations. Unstable normal modes have been identified and their parametric variation has been determined. The results show that for sufficiently large aspect ratios, the influence of the sidewalls is weak and the stability properties resemble those of the spanwise-periodic channel (investigated recently by the first author). It means that an appropriately designed transversal corrugation may be regarded as a promising method for passive enhancement of mixing in laminar regime.

hydrodynamic stability, wavy channel, wall corrugation, laminar mixing

The impact of the transversely-oriented sinusoidal wall corrugation on the hydraulic drag is investigated numerically for the flow through the channel of finite width and with flat sidewalls. The numerical method, based on the domain transformation and Chebyshev-Galerkin discretization, is used to investigate the flow resistance of the laminar, parallel and pressure-driven flow. The obtained results are compared to the reference case, i.e., to the flow through the channel with rectangular cross section of the same aspect ratio. Simple explanation of the gain in the volumetric flow rate observed in the flow through spanwise-periodic channel with long-wave transversely-oriented wall corrugation is provided. In the further analysis, pressure drop in the flows with larger Reynolds numbers are studied numerically by means of the finite-volume commercial package Fluent. Preliminary experimental results confirm the predicted tendency.

Drug reduction, finite volume flow modeling, corrugated walls