Numerical Analysis of Convection Heat Transfer From an Array of Circular Perforated Fins due to Variable Perforation Size
Among rapid advances of electrical systems electronic circuit boards have become more compact and heat production rate from their components increased considerably. Such developments raised more attention and tendency in tackling their cooling problems. A wide variety of cooling systems are developed such as various fins for decreasing the circuit board temperature. Extended surfaces or fins are good heat transfer equipments that are used for various industrial applications. The wide industrial applications of fins to enhance heat transfer rate highlighted the need for further research of optimization of fins to increase their thermal performances. Among various fin types, rectangular fins are commonly used due to their simplicity of manufacturing. Fin configurations affect the cooling rate significantly, hence a comprehensive parametric study on the fin geometries may be improve their performance. Rectangular fins show a good performance of increasing heat removal rate, while reducing the manufacturing cost. Moreover the inspiration of putting holes along the flow through the fins may be very helpful in increasing the heat removal and reduction of the needed material. The present study investigates a numerical analysis of three dimensional, turbulent convection heat transfer from an array of rectangular perforated fins with increasing the perforation size from bottom to top. The perforations considered are like circular channels along the length of fins and the number of perforations is 3. For investigation, incompressible air as working fluid is modeled using Navier–Stokes equations. RNG based k-ε turbulent model is used to predict turbulent flow parameters. Temperature field inside the fins is obtained by solving Fourier’s conduction equation. The conjugate differential equations for both solid and gas phase are solved simultaneously by finite volume procedure using SIMPLE algorithm. Flow and heat transfer characteristics are presented for Reynolds numbers from 2 × 104 to 4 × 104 based on the fin length and Prandtl number of Pr = 0.71. Numerical model is first validated with previous experimental studies and good agreements were observed. Based on the valid simulation model, numerical solution is made to find flow field and temperature distribution for various perforation size. Results show that for a specific type of perforated fins the fin effectiveness is higher than other types and drag coefficient decreases with increasing the perforation size.