Investigation of Boundary Layer Flows over Porous Media

Kurzfassung

The electrification of aircraft engines brings a lot of technical challenges. One of them is the management of heat generated by the new components of the electrical drivetrain. The rejection of large amounts of heat demands for high performance heat exchangers. One possible concept is the flow over structures with larger inner surface areas like porous materials such as gyroid structures. The goal of this thesis is to investigate the influence of different materials on the boundary flow. To achieve this, constant temperature anemometry (CTA) experiments will be performed to characterize the boundary layer flow over several porous materials in the aeroacoustic wind tunnel at BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg. The results from these measurements will be compared to the boundary layer profiles for a reference case over a smooth plate. The second part of this thesis aims to perform numerical flow simulations with OpenFOAM. The direct modeling of these porous material is computationally very expensive. Therefore, two models will be tested to reduce the computational effort. One is the Darcy-Forchheimer model for flow through porous media and the other model accounts for surface roughness. The results from the experiments will be used to evaluate the different simulation methods.