Thermal Performance Analysis of Porous Fins

Porous fins are extended heat‐transfer surfaces whose internal cavities allow fluid flow through a solid matrix, thereby combining conduction in the solid and convection within the fluid to enhance overall thermal dissipation. The analysis of their thermal performance centres on the interplay of fluid infiltration, solid–fluid heat exchange and radiative effects within a permeable medium. Models typically couple Darcy’s law for flow through porous media with the energy equations for each phase, often under local thermal non-equilibrium conditions. Researchers explore diverse fin geometries (rectangular, exponential, trapezoidal, wavy) and incorporate variable thermal conductivity, internal heat generation and hybrid nanofluids to augment heat‐transfer rates. Key metrics include temperature distribution along the fin, fin efficiency and entropy generation. Advances in analytical, numerical and machine-learning methods have yielded deeper insight into parameter sensitivities, guiding the design of lightweight, high-performance heat exchangers across power generation, electronics cooling and renewable energy systems.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have quantified entropy generation in moving exponential porous fins subject to combined convection and radiation while accounting for variable thermal conductivity and internal heat sources. Employing a numerical shooting technique, researchers demonstrated that porosity and temperature ratio exert dominant influence on irreversibility, with entropy production peaking at the fin base. Exponential fins exhibit higher entropy generation than rectangular profiles, and increases in conductivity uniformly reduce entropy. These findings elucidate second-law performance limits and inform optimisation strategies that balance enhanced heat transfer against unavoidable thermodynamic losses in porous extended surfaces.

Thermal Performance Analysis of Porous Fins publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in thermal performance analysis of porous fins across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Porous fin: An extended surface with interstitial voids that permit fluid flow, thereby enhancing heat transfer by coupling solid‐phase conduction with fluid‐phase convection.

Darcy model: A constitutive relation describing fluid velocity through a porous medium as proportional to the pressure gradient and permeability, under laminar flow conditions.

Local Thermal Non-Equilibrium (LTNE): A modelling assumption in porous media where solid and fluid phases maintain separate temperature fields rather than a common equilibrium temperature.

Nusselt number: A dimensionless ratio representing the relative magnitude of convective to conductive heat transfer at a surface.

Entropy generation: A measure of irreversibility in a thermal system arising from heat transfer and fluid friction, indicating the loss of available work potential.

References

1. Entropy generation from convective–radiative moving exponential porous fins with variable thermal conductivity and internal heat generations. Scientific Reports (2022).
2. Study of thermal variation in a longitudinal exponential porous fin wetted with TiO 2 − SiO 2 / hexanol hybrid nanofluid using hybrid residual power series method. Case Studies in Thermal Engineering (2023).
3. Heat transfer analysis in a longitudinal porous trapezoidal fin by non-Fourier heat conduction model: An application of artificial neural network with Levenberg–Marquardt approach. Case Studies in Thermal Engineering (2023).
4. Evolutionary Computing for the Radiative–Convective Heat Transfer of a Wetted Wavy Fin Using a Genetic Algorithm-Based Neural Network. Biomimetics (2023).
5. Heat transfer analysis of rectangular porous fins in local thermal non-equilibrium model. Applied Thermal Engineering (2021).