Micro-structural Impact of Different Strut Shapes and Porosity on Hydraulic Properties of Kelvin-Like Metal Foams

Various ideal periodic isotropic structures of foams (tetrakaidecahedron) with constant ligament cross section are studied. Different strut shapes namely circular, square, diamond, hexagon, star, and their various orientations are modeled using CAD. We performed direct numerical simulations at pore scale, solving Navier-Stokes equation in the fluid space to obtain various flow properties namely permeability and inertia coefficient for all shapes in the porosity range, for wide range of Reynolds numbers, . We proposed an analytical model to obtain pressure drop in metallic foams in order to correlate the resulting macroscopic pressure and velocity gradients with the Ergun-like approach. The analytical results are fully compared with the available numerical data, and an excellent agreement is observed.