Improve Heat Dissipation Rate of the Vehicle Radiator by Using Carbon Foam Material for the Fin

This paper will explore concepts of next-generation radiators that can adopt the high performance. The goal of this project is to design an advanced concept for a radiator for use in automobiles.

Utilize the recently developed high conductivity carbon foam for thermal management in heat exchangers. The technique used to fabricate the foam produces mesosphere pitch-based carbon foam with extremely high thermal conductivity and an open-celled structure.

An engineering model is formulated to account for the effects of porosity and pore diameter on the hydrodynamic and thermal performance of a carbon-foam finned tube heat exchanger. The thermal resistances are obtained from well-established correlations that are extended herein to account for the influence of the porous carbon foam.