Heat and Mass Transfer in BCC and WBCC Lattice Cores: A Preliminary Study

This article presents the preliminary results of a numerical study on the heat and mass transport properties of lattice-periodic strut-based cores. The lattice structures considered are the typical Body-Centered Cubic (BCC) and an original variant, WBCC, characterized by waved struts. A fully parametric CAD model of the lattice solid has been created, allowing the diameter of the struts and their waviness to be varied. The model is then shared with the Finite Element solver and the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) solver to obtain the average thermal flux coming from an imposed thermal gradient and the pressure drop occurring when the unit cell is subjected to a fluid flow. From the post-processing of the numerical data, the effective thermal conductivity and permeability have been calculated to quantify these phenomena. Initial results show that the numerical method correctly determines the properties of unit cells, and that waviness directly induces an orthotropic behavior of both thermal and fluid dynamic properties.