CFD characterization of flow regimes inside open cell foam substrates

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.In this work a combination of micro-CT, image-based modeling and CFD has been applied to investigate the pressure drop in open-cell foams. The analysis covers a range of flow regimes and is aimed at determining the effects of important morphological parameters on the pressure drop. The adoption of micro-CT technology along with detailed CFD modeling allows the investigation of phenomena occurring in real foam micro-structures. Moreover, by means of image processing tools, the geometry can be artificially modified in order to investigate the effects of mathematical transformation of the geometrical parameters of a real foam, one parameter at a time, e.g. varying pore size without affecting the porosity. Non-dimensional coefficients have been defined for the analysis of the results, with the purpose of describing the pressure drop as a function of the Reynolds number. The proposed formulation allows us to relate the permeability properties of an open-cell foam to its morphology alone, without any dependence on the properties of the fluid adopted or on the effective characteristic dimension of the foam micro-structure (pore or cell size). Comparison with experimental results available in the literature is also provided for one of the cases studied