A Computational Fluid Dynamic Study of a Momentum and Energy Method on Rough Surfaces

Author(s):  
Jose Urcia ◽  
Michael Kinzel

Abstract The Discrete Element Roughness Method (DERM) has been used to improve convective heat transfer predictions on surface roughness. This work aims to validate the core momentum-correlation of DERM through evaluating Computational fluid dynamics (CFD)-based solution of the flow around individual roughness elements with the goal of improving the correlations. More specifically, the matrix of scenarios evaluated using includes three different roughness elements at three different pressure drops (or flow rates). Results from these studies are to be used to validate and improve correlations used to approximate roughness in DERM. For further comparison, a fourth roughness element analyzed in previous work will also be compared. For each element, a steady and unsteady case are conducted and analyzed. The momentum loss results obtained from the CFD are then compared to the DERM-based predictions from the same roughness elements in search of any discrepancies. It is observed the momentum-correlation deviates from the CFD prediction with increasing element height.

2012 ◽  
Vol 134 (10) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ting-Yu Lin ◽  
Satish G. Kandlikar

The effect of structured roughness on the heat transfer of water flowing through minichannels was experimentally investigated in this study. The test channels were formed by two 12.7 mm wide × 94.6 mm long stainless steel strips. Eight structured roughness elements were generated using a wire electrical discharge machining (EDM) process as lateral grooves of sinusoidal profile on the channel walls. The height of the roughness structures ranged from 18 μm to 96 μm, and the pitch was varied from 250 μm to 400 μm. The hydraulic diameter of the rectangular flow channels ranged from 0.71 mm to 1.87 mm, while the constricted hydraulic diameter (obtained by using the narrowest flow gap) ranged from 0.68 mm to 1.76 mm. After accounting for heat losses from the edges and end sections, the heat transfer coefficient for smooth channels was found to be in good agreement with the conventional correlations in the laminar entry region as well as in the laminar fully developed region. All roughness elements were found to enhance the heat transfer. In the ranges of parameters tested, the roughness element pitch was found to have almost no effect, while the heat transfer coefficient was significantly enhanced by increasing the roughness element height. An earlier transition from laminar to turbulent flow was observed with increasing relative roughness (ratio of roughness height to hydraulic diameter). For the roughness element designated as B-1 with a pitch of 250 μm, roughness height of 96 μm and a constricted hydraulic diameter of 690 μm, a maximum heat transfer enhancement of 377% was obtained, while the corresponding friction factor increase was 371% in the laminar fully developed region. Comparing different enhancement techniques reported in the literature, the highest roughness element tested in the present work resulted in the highest thermal performance factor, defined as the ratio of heat transfer enhancement factor (over smooth channels) and the corresponding friction enhancement factor to the power 1/3.


Author(s):  
Gary D. Lock ◽  
Michael Wilson ◽  
J. Michael Owen

Modern gas turbines are cooled using air diverted from the compressor. In a “direct-transfer” pre-swirl system, this cooling air flows axially across the wheel-space from stationary pre-swirl nozzles to receiver holes located in the rotating turbine disc. The distribution of the local Nusselt number, Nu, on the rotating disc is governed by three non-dimensional fluid-dynamic parameters: pre-swirl ratio, βp, rotational Reynolds number, Reφ, and turbulent flow parameter, λT. This paper describes heat transfer measurements obtained from a scaled model of a gas turbine rotor-stator cavity, where the flow structure is representative of that found in the engine. The experiments reveal that Nu on the rotating disc is axisymmetric except in the region of the receiver holes, where significant two-dimensional variations have been measured. At the higher coolant flow rates studied, there is a peak in heat transfer at the radius of the pre-swirl nozzles, associated with the impinging jets from the pre-swirl nozzles. At lower coolant flow rates, the heat transfer is dominated by viscous effects. The Nusselt number is observed to increase as either Reφ or λT increases.


Energies ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 400
Author(s):  
Miftah Altwieb ◽  
Rakesh Mishra ◽  
Aliyu M. Aliyu ◽  
Krzysztof J. Kubiak

Multi-tube multi-fin heat exchangers are extensively used in various industries. In the current work, detailed experimental investigations were carried out to establish the flow/heat transfer characteristics in three distinct heat exchanger geometries. A novel perforated plain fin design was developed, and its performance was evaluated against standard plain and louvred fins designs. Experimental setups were designed, and the tests were carefully carried out which enabled quantification of the heat transfer and pressure drop characteristics. In the experiments the average velocity of air was varied in the range of 0.7 m/s to 4 m/s corresponding to Reynolds numbers of 600 to 2650. The water side flow rates in the tubes were kept at 0.12, 0.18, 0.24, 0.3, and 0.36 m3/h corresponding to Reynolds numbers between 6000 and 30,000. It was found that the louvred fins produced the highest heat transfer rate due to the availability of higher surface area, but it also produced the highest pressure drops. Conversely, while the new perforated design produced a slightly higher pressure drop than the plain fin design, it gave a higher value of heat transfer rate than the plain fin especially at the lower liquid flow rates. Specifically, the louvred fin gave consistently high pressure drops, up to 3 to 4 times more than the plain and perforated models at 4 m/s air flow, however, the heat transfer enhancement was only about 11% and 13% over the perforated and plain fin models, respectively. The mean heat transfer rate and pressure drops were used to calculate the Colburn and Fanning friction factors. Two novel semiempirical relationships were derived for the heat exchanger’s Fanning and Colburn factors as functions of the non-dimensional fin surface area and the Reynolds number. It was demonstrated that the Colburn and Fanning factors were predicted by the new correlations to within ±15% of the experiments.


Energies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 715 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannes Fugmann ◽  
Sebastian Martens ◽  
Richard Balzer ◽  
Martin Brenner ◽  
Lena Schnabel ◽  
...  

The purpose of this study is to validate a thermal-hydraulic simulation model for a new type of heat exchanger for mass, volume, and coolant/refrigerant charge reduction. The new heat exchanger consists of tubes with diameters in the range of 1 m m and wires in the range of 100 m , woven together to form a 200 × 200 × 80 m m 3 wire cloth heat exchanger. Performance of the heat exchanger has been experimentally evaluated using water as inner and air as outer heat transfer medium. A computational thermal and fluid dynamic model has been implemented in OpenFOAM®. The model allows variation of geometry and operating conditions. The validation of the model is based on one single geometry with an opaque fabric and air-side velocities between 1 and 7 m / s . The simulated and measured pressure drops are found to be in good agreement with a relative difference of less than 16%. For the investigated cases, the effective heat transfer coefficients are in very good agreement (less than 5%) when adapting the contact resistance between tubes and wires. The numerical model describes the fluid flow and heat transfer of the tested heat exchanger with adequate precision and can be used for future wire cloth heat exchanger dimensioning for a variety of applications.


2004 ◽  
Vol 127 (4) ◽  
pp. 791-797 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary D. Lock ◽  
Michael Wilson ◽  
J. Michael Owen

Modern gas turbines are cooled using air diverted from the compressor. In a “direct-transfer” preswirl system, this cooling air flows axially across the wheel space from stationary preswirl nozzles to receiver holes located in the rotating turbine disk. The distribution of the local Nusselt number Nu on the rotating disk is governed by three nondimensional fluid-dynamic parameters: preswirl ratio βp, rotational Reynolds number Reϕ, and turbulent flow parameter λT. This paper describes heat transfer measurements obtained from a scaled model of a gas turbine rotor-stator cavity, where the flow structure is representative of that found in the engine. The experiments reveal that Nu on the rotating disk is axisymmetric except in the region of the receiver holes, where significant two-dimensional variations have been measured. At the higher coolant flow rates studied, there is a peak in heat transfer at the radius of the preswirl nozzles associated with the impinging jets from the preswirl nozzles. At lower coolant flow rates, the heat transfer is dominated by viscous effects. The Nusselt number is observed to increase as either Reϕ or λT increases.


Author(s):  
Sebastian Scholl ◽  
Catherine Gorle ◽  
Farzad Houshmand ◽  
Mehdi Asheghi ◽  
Kenneth Goodson ◽  
...  

This study considers the optimization of a complex micro-scale cooling geometry that represents a unit-cell of a full heat sink microstructure. The configuration consists of a channel with a rectangular cross section and a hydraulic diameter of 100 μm, where the fluid flows between two cooling fins connected by rectangular crossbars (50 × 50 μm). A previous investigation showed that adding these crossbars at certain locations in the flow can increase the heat transfer in the microchannel, and in the present work we perform an optimization to determine the optimal location and number of crossbars. The optimization problem is defined using 12 discrete design parameters, which represent 12 crossbars at different locations in the channel that can either be turned off and become part of the fluid domain, or turned on and become part of the solid domain. The optimization was done using conjugate heat transfer computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations using Fluent 15.0. All possible 4096 configurations were simulated for one set of boundary conditions. The domain was discretized using about 1 million nodes combined for the fluid and solid domains and the computational time was around 1 CPU hour per case. The results show that further improvements in heat transfer are feasible at an optimized pressure drop. The results cover a range of pressure drops from 25 kPa to almost 90 kPa and the heat transfer coefficient varies from 60 to 120 kW/m2K. The configurations on the Pareto front show the trend that crossbars closer to the maximal fluid-solid interface result in a more optimal performance than crossbars positioned farther away. In addition to performing simulations for all possible configurations, the potential of using a genetic algorithm to identify the configurations that define the Pareto front was explored, demonstrating that a 80% reduction in computational time can be achieved. The results of this study demonstrate the significant increase in performance that can be obtained through the use of computational tools and optimization algorithms for the design of single phase cooling devices.


Author(s):  
Gary D. Lock ◽  
Youyou Yan ◽  
Paul J. Newton ◽  
Michael Wilson ◽  
J. Michael Owen

Pre-swirl nozzles are often used in gas turbines to deliver the cooling air to the turbine blades through receiver holes in a rotating disc. The distribution of the local Nusselt number, Nu, on the rotating disc is governed by three non-dimensional fluid-dynamic parameters: pre-swirl ratio, βp, rotational Reynolds number, Reφ, and turbulent flow parameter, λT. A scaled model of a gas turbine rotor-stator cavity, based on the geometry of current engine designs, has been used to create appropriate flow conditions. This paper describes how thermochromic liquid crystal (TLC), in conjunction with a stroboscopic light and digital camera, is used in a transient experiment to obtain contour maps of Nu on the rotating disc. The thermal boundary conditions for the transient technique are such that an exponential-series solution to Fourier’s one-dimensional conduction equation is necessary. A method to assess the uncertainty in the measurements is discussed and these uncertainties are quantified. The experiments reveal that Nu on the rotating disc is axisymmetric except in the region of the receiver holes, where significant two-dimensional variations have been measured. At the higher coolant flow rates studied, there is a peak in heat transfer at the radius of the pre-swirl nozzles. The heat transfer is governed by two flow regimes: one dominated by inertial effects associated with the impinging jets from the pre-swirl nozzles, and another dominated by viscous effects at lower flow rates. The Nusselt number is observed to increase as either Reφ or λT increases.


2012 ◽  
Vol 134 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven R. Mart ◽  
Stephen T. McClain ◽  
Lesley M. Wright

Many flows of engineering interest are bounded by surfaces that exhibit roughness with thermal conductivities much lower than common metals and alloys. Depending on the local roughness element convection coefficients, the low thermal conductivities of the roughness elements may create situations where temperature changes along the heights of the elements are important and must be considered in predicting the overall surface convection coefficient. The discrete-element model (DEM) for flows over rough surfaces was recently adapted to include the effects of internal conduction along the heights of ordered roughness elements. While the adapted DEM provided encouraging agreement with the available data, more data are required to validate the model. To further investigate the effects of roughness element thermal conductivity on convective heat transfer and to acquire more experimental data for DEM validation, four wind tunnel test plates were made. The test plates were constructed using Plexiglas and Mylar film with a gold deposition layer creating a constant flux boundary condition with steady state wind tunnel measurements. The four test plates were constructed with hexagonal distributions of hemispheres or cones made of either aluminum or ABS plastic. The plates with hemispherical elements had element diameters of 9.53 mm and a spacing-to-diameter ratio of 2.099. The plates with conical elements had base element diameters of 9.53 mm and a spacing-to-base-diameter ratio of 1.574. An infrared camera was used to measure the temperature of the heated plates in the Baylor Subsonic Wind Tunnel for free stream velocities ranging from 2.5 m/s to 35 m/s (resulting in Reynolds number values ranging from 90,000 to 1,400,000 based on the distance from the knife-edge to the center of the infrared camera image) in turbulent flow. At lower Reynolds numbers, the thermal conductivity of the roughness elements is a primary factor in determining the heat transfer enhancement of roughness distributions. At the higher Reynolds numbers investigated, the hemispherical distribution, which contained more sparsely spaced elements, did not exhibit a statistically significant difference in enhancement for the different thermal conductivity elements used. The results of the study indicate that the packing density of the elements and the enhancement on the floor of the roughness distribution compete with the roughness element thermal conductivity in determining the overall convection enhancement of rough surfaces.


Author(s):  
Steven R. Mart ◽  
Stephen T. McClain ◽  
Lesley M. Wright

Many flows of engineering interest are bounded by surfaces that exhibit roughness with thermal conductivities much lower than common metals and alloys. Depending on the local roughness element convection coefficients, the low thermal conductivities of the roughness elements may create situations where temperature changes along the heights of the elements are important and must be considered in predicting the overall surface convection coefficient. The discrete-element model (DEM) for flows over rough surfaces was recently adapted to include the effects of internal conduction along the heights of ordered roughness elements. While the adapted DEM provided encouraging agreement with the available data, more data are required to validate the model. To further investigate the effects of roughness element thermal conductivity on convective heat transfer and to acquire more experimental data for DEM validation, four wind tunnel test plates were made. The test plates were constructed using Plexiglas and Mylar film with a gold deposition layer creating a constant flux boundary condition with steady state wind tunnel measurements. The four test plates were constructed with hexagonal distributions of hemispheres or cones made of either aluminum or ABS plastic. The plates with hemispherical elements had element diameters of 9.53 mm and a spacing-to-diameter ratio of 2.099. The plates with conical elements had base element diameters of 9.53 mm and a spacing-to-base-diameter ratio of 1.574. An infrared camera was used to measure the temperature of the heated plates in the Baylor Subsonic Wind Tunnel for free stream velocities ranging from 2.5 m/s to 35 m/s (resulting in Reynolds number values ranging from 90,000 to 1,400,000 based on the distance from the knife-edge to the center of the infrared camera image) in turbulent flow. At lower Reynolds numbers, the thermal conductivity of the roughness elements is a primary factor in determining the heat transfer enhancement of roughness distributions. At the higher Reynolds numbers investigated, the hemispherical distribution, which contained more sparsely spaced elements, did not exhibit a statistically significant difference in enhancement for the different thermal conductivity elements used. The results of the study indicate that the packing density of the elements and the enhancement on the floor of the roughness distribution compete with the roughness element thermal conductivity in determining the overall convection enhancement of rough surfaces.


Author(s):  
Laurence F. Miller ◽  
M. Khurram Khan ◽  
Wesley Williams ◽  
F. R. Mynatt

This paper describes the evaluation of two 300 MWe modular PbBi cooled reactor system concepts that can be field assembled from components shipped on standard rail cars or on trucks. Thus, the largest components must be smaller than 12’ × 12’ × 80’ (3.66 m × 3.66 m × 24.4m) and should weigh no more than 80 tons. One of these systems utilizes a cylindrical two-loop containment vessel for the core and the other is a slab design. The fuel for both designs consists of standard-sized metallic IFR fuel in 17×17 square array assemblies with a pitch-to-diameter ratio of 1.15. The coolant outlet temperature is limited by current material technology, which is estimated to be 550 C. The primary coolant inlet temperature is selected to be 350 C. This is well above the melting temperature of PbBi, and it is expected to be sufficiently high to limit transient-induced thermal stresses to acceptable values. Coolant flow rates through the core and external piping are below 1 m/s. The results from neutronics calculations include power distributions, reactivity coefficients, and fuel depletion, and results from heat transfer calculations include temperatures and flow rates at various locations in the primary and secondary systems. The neutronic design calculations are accomplished by using a discrete ordinate transport code and a cross section processing system developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Two-dimensional flux distributions are obtained with the DOORS system, and ORIGEN-S, coupled with KENO, is used for time-dependent depletion calculations. The thermal-hydraulic design of the core consists of heat transfer and fluid flow calculation for an average channel. The inlet and outlet temperatures, along with the fuel centerline temperature, are determined in conjunction with core flow rates, pumping power, and total power output. This is accomplished by using a lumped parameter steady-state model with a spreadsheet and by using a one-dimensional time-dependent model. Results from the thermal-hydraulic calculation obtain a thermal efficiency of 41%, but an efficiency of about 45% could be obtained. The nominal power density and good thermal conductivity of Pb-Bi will permit decay heat to be handled more effectively than for sodium-cooled design or for light water reactors. The low vapor pressure of Pb-Bi permits the use of a thin walled pressure vessel on the order of centimeters as compared to the 30–40 cm thick PWR vessel, and the high boiling point of the lead bismuth assures that the core will remain covered in the event of a loss of coolant outside the primary vessel.


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