  Results from a large set of hydrodynamical SPH simulations of galaxy clusters
in a flat LCDM cosmology are used to investigate the metal enrichment and
heating of the ICM. The physical modeling of the gas includes radiative
cooling, star formation, energy feedback and metal enrichment that follow from
the explosions of SNe of type II and Ia. The metallicity dependence of the
cooling function is also taken into account. 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 ICM is critically dependent on the shape of
the metal deposition profile. For low temperatu re 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 ($T_X\sim 1keV$) 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 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.
