Thermal performance of a cold plate with 3D-printed porous inserts

Abstract

This project investigated the augmentation in the heat transfer ability of a cold plate fitted with 3D-printed porous inserts. In this project, three porous inserts of similar structures, but with varying unit cell dimensions were designed and fabricated by the Selective Laser Melting (SLM) method. The experiments of single-phase forced convection heat transfer were performed with water flowing through the cold plate, as well as a constant heat flux being applied on the surface of the cold plate. The structure of the porous inserts is the Rhombi_Octa-Dense structure, which was generated by the “Magics” software. Experiments were conducted on four different types of porous inserts, one of the porous insert was the commercial open cell metal foam while the other three of them had the Rhombi_Octa-Dense structure of 5 mm, 7.5 mm and 10 mm unit cell, which accounted for 79.85%, 82.36% and 84.85% in porosity, respectively. The results shown that the 10 mm unit cell porous structure had better heat transfer coefficient with a lower change in pressure as compared to the 5 mm unit cell porous structure as well as the commercial open cell metal foam. The investigation nonetheless shows that the porous structures fabricated by additive manufacturing have better thermal performance as compared to the commercial foams available in the market today. However, the geometries of the porous structures may not have been optimised and further studies could develop higher potential to 3D printed porous inserts as a means of enhancing heat transfer of a cold plate.