Verification of a Cost Efficient Solution to Simulate the Airflow Conditions in an Oil-to-Air Heat Exchanger of a Small Aircraft Applying Porous Material

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The scope of the paper is to introduce a simple, cost-efficient method, which is capable to simulate the air flow of a heat exchanger and can be integrated into more complex simulations. A partner institute provided data about a heat exchanger, which geometry has been replaced by a cuboid with rounded edges and porous domain has been applied into the volume. The cuboid has been extended by 5 times length of the original depth of the porous domain in upstream and downstream directions to form the flow channel, by which two fluid domains have been attached on the porous domain. Tetra elements have been used for the spatial discretization. The physical characteristics of the heat exchanger have been determined from the available data (pressure drop values at different mass flow rates). The parameters of the porous media (Kloss and Kperm) have been calculated by Darcy’s law. The volume porosity has been identified by sensitivity analyses due to missing information. Finally, the available and the numerically calculated pressure drops in the function of the mass flow rates are compared with each other. The differences between the two investigated cases are less than 2.3%, which verifies the expectations.