Heat transfer enhancement and thermodynamic optimization in metal foam integrated pipes

Exergy and entropy, based on the second law of thermodynamics, serves as a comprehensive evaluation tool for analyzing the thermodynamic performance of a system. This study focuses on enhancing heat transfer, assessing exergy limits, and minimizing entropy generation in various pore density metal foams integrated into a horizontal pipe. The analysis is conducted using ANSYS Fluent, where the pipe is embedded with a heater and subjected to a constant heat input. The validation of the current study results with experimental data from the literature confirms the trustworthiness of the adopted computational approach. The outcomes specify that increasing metal foam pore density augments the heat transfer performance; however, this augmentation comes at the cost of a higher pumping power requirement due to increased flow resistance. It also specifies that metal foam filled pipes generate less entropy than clear pipe, in that, lower pore density metal foams exhibit superior thermodynamic performance.