Comparative Study on Flow Heat Transfer Performance of Kelvin Cell and Typical Truss Structures

The Kelvin structure is a regular tetrahedral truss structure similar to the pore structure of metal foam, which is often used to simplify the simulation of metal foam. However, its flow heat transfer characteristics have rarely been compared with typical truss structures. To supplement the research work in this aspect and quantify the advantages and disadvantages of these structures compared with typical structures, this paper uses modeling software to create tetrahedrons, BCC truss structures, and Kelvin porous structures with 90% porosity, and uses Fluent to study the distribution rules of temperature, pressure, and velocity of these three structures respectively. The relationship between pressure drop, heat transfer performance, and comprehensive heat transfer performance among different structures and Reynolds number is quantified. The results show that the Kelvin structure has the best heat transfer characteristics, which is 34.6% and 28.9% higher than the tetrahedron and BCC structures, respectively. However, the Kelvin structure has the highest flow resistance, which is 70.7% and 165.3% higher than BCC and tetrahedron structures on average. When the j/f dimensionless calculation criterion is adopted, the comprehensive heat transfer performance of the tetrahedron is 40.5% and 79.8% higher than that of the BCC structure and the Kelvin structure, respectively.