A Numerical Study on Heat Transfer Characteristics of CO2-DME Mixture Fluid

Author(s):  
Xin-Rong Zhang ◽  
Jia Liu ◽  
Hiroshi Yamaguchi

In response to the call for environment protection, more and more researches have been finding new alternative refrigerants which are of zero Ozone depleting potential (ODP), low global warming potential (GWP) and will be efficient, inflammable, and nontoxic to replace the HCFCs and HFCs refrigerants. Non-azeotropic mixtures of suitable fluids are becoming the important candidates of that search race. In this paper, the flow and heat transfer performance of CO2-DME (dimethyl ether) mixture refrigerants at 8.0 MPa in a horizontal tube was numerically investigated. In particular, this work has been focused upon the laminar heat transfer characteristics of CO2-DME mixture refrigerant flow with Reynolds number ranging from 180 to 1800 and the mass fraction of DME ranging from 21% to 39%. The results show that the heat transfer performance of the mixture fluid can be improved when the mass fraction of DME increases to 30%. Considering both the best heat transfer performance and the safety, the optimum component of CO2-DME (70/30, mass%) has been found in this study. And the mechanisms that are responsible for the heat transfer enhancement are obtained and they are: (1) The temperature gradient of CO2-DME mixture fluid with high mass fraction of DME is larger than that of CO2-DME mixture fluid with low mass fraction of DME; in addition, the temperature gradient increases with the mass fraction of DME; (2) The increase of thermal conductivity for CO2-DME mixtures can enhance the heat transfer performance to a large extent. (3) The self-acceleration characteristic of the supercritical mixture fluid is also beneficial to the heat transfer enhancement. Furthermore, it is found that the heat transfer performance of the mixture fluid can also be improved with Reynolds number. The viscous boundary layer of the fluid becomes thinner when the Reynolds number increases, which leads to an enhancement in heat transfer. In addition, at high Reynolds number, the flow is tend to be turbulent, which is beneficial to the heat transfer performance of mixture fluid. With regard to the flow characteristic of mixtures, first the flowing changes depend on the temperature and the density of fluid to a large extent-the high value of velocity can occur when the fluid has a high temperature and a low density. And secondly, the supercritical CO2-DME mixtures speed up along the tube and make themselves different with water flow. These results of this study have significant implications for the design of high-performance heat exchangers, using CO2-DME mixture as the working fluid.

Author(s):  
Chao Ma ◽  
Bing Ge

The heat transfer performance of steam and air flow in a rough rectangular channel with different inverted V-shaped ribs was investigated by infrared thermal imaging technology. Under the conditions that the Reynolds number is in the range of 4000–15,000, the effects of the rib angle on the heat transfer enhancement of the two coolants were obtained. The rib pitch ratio of the flow channel is 10, the ratio of the rib height to the channel hydraulic diameter is 0.078, and the inverted V-shaped rib angle varies from 45° to 90°. The results show that in the inverted V-shaped ribbed channel, the Nu number on both sides of the channel is greatly increased, while the Nu number in the middle of the channel is lower. The local Nu distribution on the surface of the ribbed channel is highly related to the shape of the rib. For different medium cooling, the value and unevenness of the heat transfer coefficient are different, but the shape of the high and low heat transfer coefficient distribution is hardly affected. The heat transfer of both coolants increases as the rib angle decreases from 90° to 45°. Compared with air flow, steam flow cooling shows higher convective heat transfer enhancement. For rib angles of 45°, 60°, 75°, and 90°, under the operating condition of the Reynolds number = 12,000, the area-averaged Nusselt numbers of the steam flow is 23.6%, 27.4% and 13.9% higher than that of the air flow, respectively. Based on the experimental heat transfer data, the correlation in terms of the Reynolds number and the rib angle was developed, which is used to estimate the Nu number for steam and air cooling in the inverted V-shaped rib-roughness channels.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaime Rios ◽  
Mehdi Kabirnajafi ◽  
Takele Gameda ◽  
Raid Mohammed ◽  
Jiajun Xu

The present study experimentally and numerically investigates the flow and heat transfer characteristics of a novel nanostructured heat transfer fluid, namely, ethanol/polyalphaolefin nanoemulsion, inside a conventionally manufactured minichannel of circular cross section and a microchannel heat exchanger of rectangular cross section manufactured additively using the Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS) process. The experiments were conducted for single-phase flow of pure polyalphaolefin (PAO) and ethanol/PAO nanoemulsion fluids with two ethanol concentrations of 4 wt% and 8 wt% as well as for two-phase flow boiling of nanoemulsion fluids to study the effect of ethanol nanodroplets on the convective flow and heat transfer characteristics. Furthermore, the effects of flow regime of the working fluids on the heat transfer performance for both the minichannel and microchannel heat exchangers were examined within the laminar and transitional flow regimes. It was found that the ethanol/PAO nanoemulsion fluids can improve convective heat transfer compared to that of the pure PAO base fluid under both single- and two-phase flow regimes. While the concentration of nanoemulsion fluids did not reflect a remarkable distinction in single-phase heat transfer performance within the laminar regime, a significant heat transfer enhancement was observed using the nanoemulsion fluids upon entering the transitional flow regime. The heat transfer enhancement at higher concentrations of nanoemulsion within the transitional regime is mainly attributed to the enhanced interaction and interfacial thermal transport between ethanol nanodroplets and PAO base fluid. For two-phase flow boiling, heat transfer coefficients of ethanol/PAO nanoemulsion fluids were further enhanced when the ethanol nanodroplets underwent phase change. A comparative study on the flow and heat transfer characteristics was also implemented between the traditionally fabricated minichannel and additively manufactured microchannel of similar dimensions using the same working fluid of pure PAO and the same operating conditions. The results revealed that although the DMLS fabricated microchannel posed a higher pressure loss, a substantial heat transfer enhancement was achieved as compared to the minichannel heat exchanger tested under the same conditions. The non-post processed surface of the DMLS manufactured microchannel is likely to be the main contributor to the augmented heat transfer performance. Further studies are required to fully appreciate the possible mechanisms behind this phenomenon as well as the convective heat transfer properties of nanoemulsion fluids.


2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (1 Part A) ◽  
pp. 279-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shuxia Qiu ◽  
Peng Xu ◽  
Liping Geng ◽  
Arun Mujumdar ◽  
Zhouting Jiang ◽  
...  

Air jet impingement is one of the effective cooling techniques employed in micro-electronic industry. To enhance the heat transfer performance, a cooling system with air jet impingement on a finned heat sink is evaluated via the computational fluid dynamics method. A two-dimensional confined slot air impinging on a finned flat plate is modeled. The numerical model is validated by comparison of the computed Nusselt number distribution on the impingement target with published experimental results. The flow characteristics and heat transfer performance of jet impingement on both of smooth and finned heat sinks are compared. It is observed that jet impingement over finned target plate improves the cooling performance significantly. A dimensionless heat transfer enhancement factor is introduced to quantify the effect of jet flow Reynolds number on the finned surface. The effect of rectangular fin dimensions on impingement heat transfer rate is discussed in order to optimize the cooling system. Also, the computed flow and thermal fields of the air impingement system are examined to explore the physical mechanisms for heat transfer enhancement.


Author(s):  
Huimin Tang ◽  
Huiying Wu

In this paper, the silicon-based corrugated microchannels used for the heat transfer enhancement were fabricated by MEMS technology for the first time. Both the flow and convective heat transfer characteristics of the deionized water through these corrugated microchannels were investigated experimentally, and comparisons were performed between corrugated microchannels and straight microchannels with the same cross-sectional aspect ratio (height-to-width ratio) and same hydraulic diameter. Experimental results showed that both the flow friction and Nusselt number in corrugated microchannels increased considerably compared with those in straight microchannels, and this increase became enlarged with the increase in the Reynolds number. With the same pumping power, using corrugated microchannels instead of straight microchannels caused the reduction in the total thermal resistance. The heat transfer enhancement mechanism of the corrugated microchannels was discussed. The results presented in this paper help to design the high efficiency integrated chip cooling system.


Author(s):  
Feng Zhang ◽  
Xinjun Wang ◽  
Jun Li ◽  
Rui Tan ◽  
Dongliang Wei

The present numerical study is conducted to investigate the flow and heat transfer characteristics for impingement cooling on concave or convex dimpled plate with four different dimple arrangements. The investigation of the impingement cooling on the flat plate is also conducted to serve as a contrast and these results are compared with experimental measurements to verify the computational method. Dimples studied here are placed, relative to impingement holes, in either spanwise shifted, in staggered, in in-line, or in streamwise shifted arrangements. The flow structure, pressure loss and heat transfer characteristics of the concave and convex dimpled plate of four different dimple arrangements have been obtained and compared with flat plate for the Reynolds number range of 15000 to 35000. The results show that compared with flat plate, the added concave or convex dimples only causes a negligible increase in the pressure loss, and the pressure loss is insensitive to concave or convex dimple arrangement patterns. In addition, compared with flat plate, both spanwise shifted and staggered concave dimple arrangements show better heat transfer performance, while in-line concave dimple arrangement show worse results. Besides that, the heat transfer performance for streamwise shifted concave dimple arrangement is the worst. Furthermore, compared with flat plate, all convex dimple arrangements studied here show better heat transfer performance.


2015 ◽  
Vol 138 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lu Zheng ◽  
Yonghui Xie ◽  
Di Zhang ◽  
Haoning Shi

Passive flow control and heat transfer enhancement technique has become an attractive method for device internal cooling with low resistance penalty. In the present paper, the flow and heat transfer characteristics in the small scale rectangular channel with different groove–protrusions are investigated numerically. Furthermore, the combination effect with ribs is studied. The numerical results show that on the groove side, the flow separation mainly occurs at the leading edge, and the reattachment mainly occurs at the trailing edge in accordance with the local Nusselt number distribution. On the protrusion side, the separation mainly occurs at the protrusion back porch and enhances the heat transfer at the leading edge of the downstream adjacent groove. The rectangle case provides the highest dimensionless heat transfer enhancement coefficient Nu/Nu0, dimensionless resistance coefficient f/f0, and thermal performance (TP) with the highest sensitivity of Re. When ribs are employed, the separation bubble sizes prominently decrease, especially inside the second and third grooves. The Nu/Nu0 values significantly increase when ribs are arranged, and the one-row case provides the highest heat transfer enhancement by ribs. Besides, the two-row case provides the highest Nu/Nu0 value without ribs, and the three-row case shows the lowest Nu/Nu0 value whether ribs are arranged or not.


Author(s):  
Khalid N. Alammar ◽  
Lin-wen Hu

Numerical analysis is performed to examine axisymmetric laminar flow and heat transfer characteristics of colloidal dispersions of nanoparticles in water (nanofluids). Effect of volume fraction on flow and heat transfer characteristics is investigated. Four different materials, Alumina, Copper, Copper Oxide, and Graphite are considered. Heat transfer and property measurements were conducted previously for Alumina nanofluid. The measurements have shown that nanofluids can behave as homogeneous mixtures. It is found that oxide-based nanofluids offer the least heat transfer enhancement compared to elements-based nanofluids. When normalized by friction pressure drop, it is shown that graphite can have the highest effective heat transfer enhancement. For a given volume flow rate, all nanofluids exhibited linear increase in heat transfer enhancement with increasing colloids volume fraction, up to 0.05.


Author(s):  
Ruixian Fang ◽  
Wei Jiang ◽  
Jamil Khan ◽  
Roger Dougal

The present study experimentally investigated a new hybrid cooling scheme by combination of a microchannel heat sink with a micro-synthetic jet actuator. The heat sink consisted of a single rectangular microchannel measured 550 μm wide, 500 μm deep and 26 mm long. The synthetic jet actuator with a 100 μm diameter orifice was placed right above the microchannel and 5 mm downstream from the channel inlet. Micro jet is synthesized from the fluid flowing through the microchannel. Periodic disturbance is generated when the synthetic jet interacts with the microchannel flow. Heat transfer performance is enhanced as local turbulence is generated and propagated downstream the microchannel. The scale and frequency of the disturbance can be controlled by changing the driving voltage and frequency of the piezoelectric driven synthetic jet actuator. The effects of synthetic jet on microchannel heat transfer performance were studied based on the microchannel flow Reynolds number, the jet operating voltage and frequency, respectively. It shows that the synthetic jet has a greater heat transfer enhancement for microchannel flow at lower Reynolds number. It also shows that the thermal effects of the synthetic jet are functions of the jet driving voltage and frequency. We obtained around 42% heat transfer enhancement for some test cases, whereas the pressure drop across the microchannel increases very slightly. The paper concludes that the synthetic jet can effectively enhance single-phase liquid microchannel heat transfer performance and would have more promising enhancements if multi-jets are applied along the microchannel.


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