Recently, the paper titled Experimental and numerical study on melting of phase change materials in metal foams at pore scale (Int. J. Heat Mass Transfer, 72 (2014), pp. 646-655) that was published by Professor Zhenqian Chen and Associate Professor Juan Shi of our school won the second place in the first Minkowycz Award for Best Paper in IJHMT.
In this paper, a thermal lattice Boltzmann model with doubled populations was implemented to simulate the effects of porous metal foams on PCM melting at the pore size. The numerical results agree well with the experimental observations qualitatively, which implies that the presented LBM method is a potential way to simulate solid–liquid phase-change heat transfer in porous media at the pore scale. The mechanism of foam metal strengthening solid–liquid phase-change heat transfer was also obtained.
The Minkowycz Award for Best Paper was established in honor of Professor Wally Minkowycz, the longest-term Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, to recognize the best papers published in this journal. The award selects the best academic papers published during 2014-2018 based on downloads, citations, and the originality and interest of the paper topics.
