Open Access

ARTICLE

Comparative Study on Flow Heat Transfer Performance of Kelvin Cell and Typical Truss Structures

Yi Lu, Liangliang Liu^*, Haigang Liu

Shenyang Aircraft Design Research Institute, Department of Electromechanical System, Shenyang, China

* Corresponding Author: Liangliang Liu. Email:

(This article belongs to the Special Issue: Advances in Heat Exchanger Design, Performance, and Applications)

Frontiers in Heat and Mass Transfer 2026, 24(2), 13 https://doi.org/10.32604/fhmt.2026.076230

Received 17 November 2025; Accepted 02 February 2026; Issue published 30 April 2026

Abstract

The Kelvin structure is a regular tetrahedral truss structure similar to the pore structure of metal foam, which is often used to simplify the simulation of metal foam. However, its flow heat transfer characteristics have rarely been compared with typical truss structures. To supplement the research work in this aspect and quantify the advantages and disadvantages of these structures compared with typical structures, this paper uses modeling software to create tetrahedrons, BCC truss structures, and Kelvin porous structures with 90% porosity, and uses Fluent to study the distribution rules of temperature, pressure, and velocity of these three structures respectively. The relationship between pressure drop, heat transfer performance, and comprehensive heat transfer performance among different structures and Reynolds number is quantified. The results show that the Kelvin structure has the best heat transfer characteristics, which is 34.6% and 28.9% higher than the tetrahedron and BCC structures, respectively. However, the Kelvin structure has the highest flow resistance, which is 70.7% and 165.3% higher than BCC and tetrahedron structures on average. When the j/f dimensionless calculation criterion is adopted, the comprehensive heat transfer performance of the tetrahedron is 40.5% and 79.8% higher than that of the BCC structure and the Kelvin structure, respectively.

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Keywords

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