Equivalent particle diameter and length scale for pressure drop in porous metals

The internal architecture of metal foam is significantly different from that of traditional porous media. This provides a set of challenges for understanding the fluid flow in this relatively new class of materials. This paper proposes that despite the geometrical differences between metal foam and traditional porous media, the Ergun correlation is a good fit for the linear pressure drop as a function of the Darcian velocity, provided that an appropriate equivalent particle diameter is used. The paper investigates an appropriate particle diameter considering the physics of energy dissipation, i.e. the viscous shear and the form drag. The above approach is supported by wind tunnel steady-state unidirectional pressure drop measurements for airflow through several isotropic open-cell aluminum foam samples having different porosities and pore densities. For each foam sample, the equivalent particle diameter correlated well with the surface area per unit volume of the foam. This was also very well valid for previous porous metal pressure drop data in the open literature.