ABSTRACT
Many scholars have begun to pay attention to the application of metal foam to enhance the heat transfer. Flow and heat transfer characteristics of nanofluids have always been the research focus of scholars. The heat source from the solid phase makes the heat transfer effect better, and when this heat source is large, the results obtained with a simple local thermal equilibrium (LTE) model are erroneous. The lattice Boltzmann (LB) method is very suitable for dealing with conjugating transport problem of nanofluids within the metal foam. The thermophysical properties of nanofluid are related to the properties of the base fluid, nanoparticles, and the volume fraction of the nanoparticles. Natural and forced convections of nanofluids in metal foams were studied with the LB method. The LB model for the nanofluid natural convection phenomenon in the square cavity of metal foam was established and numerically studied based on the LTE model.
