Pressure drop prediction for flow through high porosity metallic foams

Permeability of open-pore microcellular materials

“…These plots are linear, showing that flow is indeed in the regime of validity of DarcyÕs law. Multiplying the slope of these lines with the viscosity l of the fluid yields the permeability K. Resulting values for K are given in Table 1 [5,21,[25][26][27]32] are added to the plot after division of reported permeabilities by reported average pore diameters squared.…”

“…4, namely the model of Du Plessis et al [31][32][33] as improved by Fourie and Du Plessis, Eq. (35) in [24].…”

“…An approach specifically conceived for open-pore cellular materials was proposed by Du Plessis et al [31][32][33]. Their model uses the volumetric averaging approach to calculate the resistance to flow of a Newtonian fluid through a periodic unit cell shaped as a cube containing three perpendicular solid rods of rectangular cross-section situated along three of its edges.…”

“…The model shows good predictive power when confronted with experimental data on open-cell ERG aluminium foams of high porosity; however, the porosity range explored is rather narrow, i.e., between 92% and 96%. Also, pre-calibration of the model against experimental data was needed to fix the ratio between the edge length of the assumed cubic unit cell and the average foam pore diameter; in other words, the model contained an adjustable parameter [32]. Fourie and Du Plessis et al [24] later resolved the issue by calculating the ratio between their cubic cell size and that of a more realistic tetrakaidecahedral foam unit cell having the same specific surface.…”

The influence of structural parameters on the permeability of ceramic foams

“…Of these correlations that of DuPlessis et al (1994) is worth mentioning. It assumes that the cell medium is formed of cubic unit cells, resulting in the following correlation:…”