Simulation analysis of heat transfer performance of two-dimensional cellular metal sandwich cylindrical shell

Considering a prototype of the detonation combustor of a pulse detonation engine (PDE), we investigate by using numerical simulation the heat transfer performance of the sandwich cylindrical shell with two-dimensional honeycomb metal core. The open-hole direction of honeycomb metal core is parallel to the axial direction of the PDE tube, which affords the facilitation of the forced air convection with the open channel to remove a heat flux impinging on the inner surface of the metallic sandwich cylindrical shell. In the radial direction, the cells are arranged semi-periodically, but, in the loop direction, they revolve periodically. The heat transfer performances of the honeycomb metal with hexagonal, rectangular and triangular geometries are obtained respectively by numerical simulation. The effects of geometry, relative density and number of layers on the heat transfer performance are consecutively discussed. The simulation results, presented in Figs. 4, 5 and 7 and Tables 5 and 6, and their discussion show preliminarily that: (1) the hexagonal geometry is the most desirable among the five geometries; (2) there is an optimal relative density of the honeycomb metal for maximum heat transfer performance; (3) the heat transfer performance improves as the number of layers increases, however the heat transfer performance stabilizes when the number of layers is larger than a certain value.