Enhanced Convective Heat Transfer in New Triply Periodic Minimal Surface Structures: Numerical and Experimental Investigation

Abstract

Triply Periodic Minimal Surfaces (TPMS) structures have garnered significant attention as potential thermal management solutions due to their repetitive and interconnected minimal surfaces. However, to further enhance the convective heat transfer performance of TPMS, a new TPMS structure is proposed in this study. The thermal characteristics of these newly proposed TPMS structures are examined and compared against established structures such as Diamond, Gyroid, SplitP, and Lidinoid structures. Both experimental measurements and numerical simulations were employed to evaluate the interfacial heat transfer performance and to validate the simulation methodology. The experiments involved varying airflow rates within a channel, while numerical simulations provided insights into the fluid flow characteristics. The numerical simulation results indicate that the new TPMS models, especially TPMS1 and TPMS2, have superior convective heat transfer coefficients, outperforming the Diamond and Gyroid models by 17.7% to 27.2%. In the experiment results, TPMS1 demonstrated superior convective heat transfer coefficients around 14.6% and a 13.6% surge in the Nusselt number compared to the Gyroid structure, facilitated by enhanced fluid distribution effects and increased fluid-solid contact area. The pressure drop results indicated that the Gyroid, Diamond and TPMS1 structures exhibited the lowest pressure drop compared to other models. The study also uncovered that extensive periodicity in TPMS structures may negatively impact heat transfer performance by limiting beneficial vortex generation and increasing pressure drop. These findings highlight the potential and inherent limitations of TPMS structures in optimizing heat transfer and underscore the need for further investigation to fine-tune TPMS parameters.

Keywords: Triply periodic minimal surfaceHeat transfer coefficientGyroid cellNusselt number3D printing