Flow and Heat Transfer Characteristics of 3d Printed Sheet and Solid Triply Periodic Minimal Surfaces Porous Structures

Abstract

Triply periodic minimal surfaces (TPMS) are recently widely employed in thermal engineering applications due to their smooth surfaces, high surface area to volume ratio and mathematically controlled geometry features. Although the sheet-type TPMS shows good heat transfer capacity between the fluid and the skeleton surface, the pressure drop of this structure is large resulting from its partially disconnected surface. In this paper, four TPMS structures, sheet Gyroid, solid Gyroid, solid Primitive and solid Diamond were designed and manufactured by 3D printing technology. The heat transfer performance of different TPMS structures and the fin structure was researched by means of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations and experimental methods.

Keywords: Triply periodic minimal surfaces, Heat transfer, 3D printing, Computational fluid dynamics