Numerical Investigation of Molten Metal Infiltration and Pillared Cooling Systems at Microscale
Abstract
Flow-through porous media at pore-scales is one of the less explored sides of fluid mechanics due to the complexity associated with highly irregular pore geometry. Most of the established methods that try to quantify such flow are based on statistical observations of flow through numerous porous specimens. Such understandings may satisfy the need for applications where micro-level details are not a concern. Some numerical approaches did try to analyze the micro-level flow, but the analysis was confined to small sample sizes due to the intensive computation challenge. There are several applications of porous media flow where analyzing the large-scale flow physics combined with the micro-level details can make a big difference. For example, the flow of molten metal through a matrix when manufacturing Metal Matrix Composites and flow of water through a micro-pillared cooling system.In this thesis, I used the pore network flow analysis software—Exascale Pore Network Simulator or EXPNS—an in-house software developed by our research group. The software is based on the “network resistance theory” for the molten metal flow through an irregular shaped matrix and Sandia’s scalable and portable software framework, and hence is uniquely designed to harnesses the power of high-performance computing (HPC) and can handle data- and computation-intensive problems. Metal Matrix Composites are on high demand in the car and aerospace industry due to its desirable properties; this flow analysis will help to increase products quality. Besides this, I also analyzed flow resistances of the flow-through micro-pillared wick structure with variable diameter, relevant for understanding the heat removal bottleneck in the electronic chip. Capillary-based micro-pillared wick structure cooling system is a promising new solution for that. I analyzed the flow resistances of such structures with variable diameter which can help better understand the flow.
Subject Area
Fluid mechanics|Mechanical engineering|Computational physics
Recommended Citation
Hossain, Shaikh Tanveer, "Numerical Investigation of Molten Metal Infiltration and Pillared Cooling Systems at Microscale" (2019). ETD Collection for University of Texas, El Paso. AAI22623545.
https://scholarworks.utep.edu/dissertations/AAI22623545