Research Paper A simplified methodology to simulate a heat exchanger in an aircraft’s oil cooler by means of a Porous Media model Marilena Musto a, *, Nicola Bianco a , Giuseppe Rotondo a , Flavio Toscano a , Giuseppe Pezzella b a Department of Industrial Engineering(DII), Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, P.leTecchio 80, 80125 Napoli, Italy b Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Centro Italiano Ricerche Aerospaziali(CIRA), Via Maiorise, 81043 Capua, Italy H I G H L I G H T S • CFD simulation of aircraft turboprop’s oil cooler exchanger by means of Porous Media. • Comparison between experimental data and CFD results. • Porous Media model is used to simulate the HE main effects (pressure drop, heat rejection). ARTICLE INFO Article history: Received 28 November 2014 Accepted 29 October 2015 Available online 11 November 2015 Keywords: CFD Heat exchanger Turboprop oil cooler Porous media model A B ST R AC T This work describes a simplified methodology to model (air-side) a heat exchanger within a computa- tional fluid dynamics analysis of an oil cooler device for aerospace applications. Although several CFD solvers provide specific tools to simulate a heat exchanger, sometimes the available data, as for example, cooling plate geometries, dimensions and their arrangement in the heat exchanger, are not exhaustive enough to set up the numerical simulation. Hence, in the present research was used a porous media model to simulate the main effects of the heat exchanger, such as pressure drop and heat rejection, on the flowfield occurs place inside an aircraft oil cooler system. In this way, the need to model the real complex geom- etry of the heat exchanger is avoided. In this framework, present analyses aim at verifying that the heat exchanger, under investigation, is able to satisfy the system requirements in terms of heat rejection of the engine’s oil cooling system, foreseen for the aircraft operating conditions. In particular, the paper analyzes a turboprop oil cooler heat exchanger when the aircraft is flying at cruise conditions, namely 2743 m (9000 ft) altitude, focusing attention on several heat exchanger flow field features such as air pressure drop, temperature change and mass flow rate. Finally, those numerical results are analyzed in detail and compared to experimental data available for the heat exchanger, thus pointing out that this design approach represents a viable option in the framework of oil cooling heat exchanger performance investigation. © 2015 Published by Elsevier Ltd. 1. Introduction Today the growth and development in Computational Fluid Dy- namics (CFD) and its possibility to model complex phenomena is constantly widening the range of application in automotive and aero- space design activities [1,2]. Although several CFD solvers provide specific tools to simulate a heat exchanger, sometimes the available data, as for example, cooling plate geometries, dimensions and their arrangement in the heat exchanger, are not exhaustive enough to set up the nu- merical simulation. Hence, in the present research was used a porous media model to simulate the main effects of the heat exchanger, such as pressure drop and heat rejection, on the flowfield occurs inside an aircraft oil cooler system. In this way, the need to model the real complex geometry of the heat exchanger is avoided. In recent years, porous media (PM) have been widely studied within heat transfer problems for their capability to enhance the rate of transferred thermal energy. Furthermore, several commer- cial CFD software provide specific tools to simulate an HE or a PM. In several papers, their comparison, in terms of strengths and weak- nesses, has already been discussed [3]. The possibility to schematize a heat exchanger with a PM, having the same thermal and flow be- havior, has been investigated by several authors. Missirlis et al. [4,5] studied how to model elliptic-tubes HE for the recovery of the thermal energy of the aero-engine’s exhaust gas. Missirlis et al. [5], * Corresponding author. Tel.: +39 081 7682290; fax: +39 081 2390364. E-mail address: marilena.musto@unina.it (M. Musto). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.applthermaleng.2015.10.147 1359-4311/© 2015 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Applied Thermal Engineering 94 (2016) 836–845 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Applied Thermal Engineering journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/apthermeng