Results from a large set of hydrodynamical smoothed-particle-hydrodynamic ( SPH ) simulations of galaxy clusters in a flat \Lambda CDM cosmology are used to investigate the metal enrichment and heating of the intracluster medium ( ICM ) .
The physical modeling of the gas includes radiative cooling , star formation , energy feedback and metal enrichment that follow from the explosions of supernovae of type II and Ia .
The metallicity dependence of the cooling function is also taken into account .
The gas is metal enriched from star particles according to the SPH prescriptions .
The simulations have been performed to study the dependence of final metal abundances and heating of the ICM on the numerical resolution and the model parameters .

For a fiducial set of model prescriptions the results indicate radial iron profiles in broad agreement with observations ; global iron abundances are also consistent with data .
It is found that the iron distribution in the intracluster medium is critically dependent on the shape of the metal deposition profile .
At large radii the radial iron abundance profiles in the simulations are steeper than those in the data , suggesting a dynamical evolution of simulated clusters different from those observed .
For low temperature clusters simulations yield iron abundances below the allowed observational range , unless it is introduced a minimum diffusion length of metals in the ICM .
The simulated emission-weighted radial temperature profiles are in good agreement with data for cooling flow clusters , but at very small distances from the cluster centres ( \sim 2 \% of the virial radii ) the temperatures are a factor \sim two higher than the measured spectral values .

The luminosity-temperature relation is in excellent agreement with the data , cool clusters ( T _ { X } \sim 1 keV ) have a core excess entropy of \sim 200 keVcm ^ { 2 } and their X-ray properties are unaffected by the amount of feedback energy that has heated the ICM .
The findings support the model proposed recently by Bryan , where the cluster X-ray properties are determined by radiative cooling .
The fraction of hot gas f _ { g } at the virial radius increases with T _ { X } and the distribution obtained from the simulated cluster sample is consistent with the observational ranges .