Influence of Thermo-Physical Properties on the Flow and Heat Transfer in Rectangular Micro-Channels

2011 ◽  
Vol 347-353 ◽  
pp. 2640-2644 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xue Tao Duan ◽  
Bin Xu ◽  
Hao Luo

This paper investigated the behaviors of flow and heat transfer of single-phase in rectangular micro-channels with three-dimensional numerical analysis. The single micro-channel is 200μm deep, 50μm wide. Deionized water was used as the working fluid. The fluid physical properties varying with temperature and Re number were studied. Comparisons were made among the results obtained from experiments, numerical simulations, and from those in the literature. The results indicated that the friction factors decreasing along the flow direction were ascribed to the fluid temperature rising under the unified heat flux boundary condition. It was found that influence of viscosity variation with temperature and viscous dissipation effect could be too significant to be neglected.

Author(s):  
Qingming Liu ◽  
Björn Palm ◽  
Henryk Anglart

3D simulations on confined bubbles in micro-channels with diameter of 1.24 mm were conducted. The working fluid is R134a with a mass flux range from 125kg/m2s to 375kg/m2s. The VOF model is chosen to capture the 2 phase interface while the geo-construction method was used to re-construct the 2-phase interface. A heated boundary wall with heat flux varying from 15kW/m2 to 102kW/m2 is supplied. The wall temperature was calculated. The effects of mass flux and heat flux are studied. The shape of the bubble was predicted by the simulation successfully and the results show that they are independent of the initial shape. Both thin film evaporation and micro convection enhance the heat transfer. However, the micro convection which is caused by bubble motion has greater contribution to the total heat transfer at the stage of bubble growth studied.


Author(s):  
Ann Lee ◽  
Victoria Timchenko ◽  
Guan H. Yeoh ◽  
John A. Reizes

An in-house computer code is developed and applied to investigate the effect of a synthetic jet on heat transfer rates in forced convection of water in silicon micro-channels etched in the rear side of the silicon substrate. To account for the deflection of the membrane located at the bottom of the actuator cavity, a moving mesh technique to solve the flow and heat transfer is purposefully adopted. The governing equations are transformed into the curvilinear coordinate system in which the grid velocities evaluated are then fed into the computation of the flow in the cavity domain thus allowing the conservation equations of mass, momentum and energy to be solved within the stationary computational domain. The fully three-dimensional model considers the SIMPLE method to link the pressure and velocity. A heat flux of 1 MW/m2 is applied at the surface of the top of the silicon wafer and the resulting complex, conjugate heat transfer through the silicon substrate is included. The hydrodynamics feature of the flow is validated against existing experimental results and verified against numerical results from commercial package ANSYS CFX 11.0. Good agreement has been achieved. To track the development of the flow and heat transfer when the actuator is switched on, numerical results of 20 full cycles of the actuator are simulated. When the actuator is switched on, noticeable temperature drop is observed at all points in the substrate from those which existed when there has been a steady water flow in the channel. At the end of 20th cycle of actuation, the maximum temperature in the wafer has reduced by 5.4 K in comparison with the steady flow values. In comparison with the two-dimensional study which account for 17K reduction, it indicates that synthetic jet has only smaller beneficial cooling and has been over-estimated in the previous two-dimensional study.


Author(s):  
Hui Miao ◽  
Yong Huang ◽  
Fa Xie ◽  
Haigang Chen ◽  
Fang Wang

Liquid laminar flow and heat transfer characteristics for parallel plate micro-channels consisting of many triangle shape hollows to fit with the etching surfaces are investigated numerically in the present paper. The height of the channel is 50μm, with three different relative depths, three relative spacing, and three oblique angles of the triangle surface, respectively. The 2D N-S and energy equations are solved using a commercial CFD code FLUENT6.3. Water is used as the working fluid, and the Reynolds number ranges from 100 to 1500. The global Poiseuille number and average Nusselt number are obtained. It is shown that the dented shapes cause a modest influence in Poiseuille number, but a greater impact on the Nusselt numbers. In addition, both of Po and Nu increase modestly with Re. The local Nusselt numbers are always lower in dented area and larger in planar area of dented roughness microchannels, than that of conventional smooth value. Finally, geometry parameters have modest impact on heat transfer for dented roughness.


2008 ◽  
Vol 130 (11) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yinhai Zhu ◽  
Yanzhong Li

In this paper, four basic fins of the plate-fin heat exchangers, rectangular plain fin, strip offset fin, perforated fin, and wavy fin, are modeled and simulated by taking account of fin thickness, thermal entry effect, and end effect. Three-dimensional numerical simulations on the flow and heat transfer in the four fins are investigated and carried out at laminar flow regime. Validity of the modeling technique is verified by comparing computational results with both corresponding experimental data and three empirical correlations from literatures. Global average Colburn factor (j factor) and friction factor (f factor) and their local 1D streamwise-average distributions along the fins are presented by introducing data reduction method. The heat transfer behaviors in both the developing and developed regions are analyzed by examining variations of the local Nusselt number along the flow direction. It is found that the thermal entry length of the four fins might be expressed in the format of Le=c1 Rec2 Pr Dh, which has the same form as the one in a circular tube.


Author(s):  
C. Prakash ◽  
R. Zerkle

The present study deals with the numerical prediction of turbulent flow and heat transfer in a 2:1 aspect ratio rectangular duct with ribs on the two shorter sides. The ribs are of square cross–section, staggered and aligned normal (90–deg) to the main flow direction. The ratio of rib height to duct hydraulic diameter equals 0.063, and the ratio of rib spacing to rib height equals 10. The duct may be stationary or rotating. The axis of rotation is normal to the axis of the duct and parallel to the ribbed walls (i.e., the ribbed walls form the leading and the trailing faces). The problem is three–dimensional and fully elliptic; hence, for computational economy, the present analysis deals only with a periodically–fully–developed situation where the calculation domain is limited to the region between two adjacent ribs. Turbulence is modelled with the k–epsilon model in conjunction with wall–functions. However, since the rib height is small, use of wall–functions necessitates that the Reynolds number be kept high. (Attempts to use a two–layer model that permits integration to the wall did not yield satisfactory results and such modelling issues are discussed at length). Computations are made here for Reynolds number in the range (30,000–100,000) and for Rotation number=0 (stationary), 0.06, and 0.12. For the stationary case, the predicted heat transfer agrees well with the experimental correlations. Due to the Coriolis induced secondary flow, rotation is found to enhance heat transfer from the trailing and the side walls, while decreasing heat transfer from the leading face. Relative to the corresponding stationary case, the effect of rotation is found to be less for a ribbed channel as compared to a smooth channel.


Author(s):  
HoKi Lee ◽  
C. D. Richards ◽  
R. F. Richards

Experimental and numerical results are presented for steady evaporating flow heat transfer from open top square micro-channels. Radial channels, 40 microns high, and 35, 50 and 70 microns wide with 5 micron wide SU-8 walls are considered. The channels are filled with Fluorinert FC77 working fluid pumped by capillary forces from a reservoir at the outer circumference of the radial channels. An energy balance on the radial channels including heat into the channels, conduction heat transfer radially along the channels and latent heat transfer via evaporation of the working fluid from the channels is experimentally determined. Microphotography is used to visualize the working fluid and the meniscus contact angles in the channels. A three-dimensional finite difference time-domain integration is used to predict sensible heat transfer rates and latent heat transfer/ evaporation rates. Experimental measurements are compared to the numerical results to extract estimates of the liquid thickness in the channels.


Author(s):  
Zhigang Liu ◽  
Ning Guan ◽  
Masahiro Takei

The flow and the heat transfer characteristics in quartz microtube with inner diameter of 0.0196mm are investigated experimentally. By measuring the pressure drop between the inlet and outlet of microtube with different working fluid and the average temperature of microtube wall heated by steam, the corresponding friction factors and Nusselt number are obtained. The experimental results show the friction factors in microtubes exceeds the prediction of Hagen-Poiseulle due to the predominance of the electrical double layer effect (EDL effect) when the working fluid is distilled water, and the experimental Nusselt number is less than the classical laminar at Reynolds number<500 due to the effects of the variation of the thermophysical properties with temperature and the conjugate heat transfer. However, the effect of viscous dissipation results in temperature rise of the working fluid, due to which the friction factors are less than the prediction of Hagen-Poiseulle with the working fluid of tetrachloromethane. Using nitrogen gas as the working fluid, the rarefaction effect still brings on that the friction factor is less than the classical laminar solution, though gas density and viscosity increases resulted from the stagnant velocity between gas and inner wall and the viscous heating lead to the increase of friction factor.


2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yan-Hui Feng ◽  
Ai-Guo Wang ◽  
Lin Lin ◽  
Xin-Xin Zhang ◽  
Xin Liu

The flow and heat transfer of rarefied gas in rough microchannels, which are confined between two infinite large parallel plates with uniformly distributed triangular rough elements, are simulated by DSMC method with Delaunay triangulation meshes. Analysis and comparison are carried out on smooth and rough channels with rough elements of different size or/and distribution density. Roughness in micro-channels affect the gas flow and heat transfer greatly. As the size or/and the number of rough elements increases, the gas velocity jumps more seriously, even being accompanied by some vortices; furthermore, the gas temperature increases, but both the mass flux and the heat transfer rate decrease. In the flow direction, the gas temperature rises first and then falls; the local pressure increases at the windward of rough elements and decreases at the leeward side; moreover, the heat flux at the surface shows violent fluctuation, that is, the heat flux at the rough element surface is much smaller than that at the channel wall surface.


Author(s):  
Aristotel Popescu ◽  
James R. Welty ◽  
David Pfund ◽  
David Rector

This paper reports on an experimental study of heat transfer in high aspect ratio (width/depth), rectangular micro-channels. A single channel with width of 10 μm was cut into polycarbonate spacers of various thicknesses, resulting in channel depths of 128 μm, 263 μm and 521 μm. Heat transfer experiments were performed with a constant heat flux boundary condition applied at the surface of the channel. Experiments conducted for refrigerant R-124 working fluid in the range Re = 300 − 900 and Pr = 3.6 − 3.8 showed small or no departure from macro-scale predictions for channels with hydraulic diameters larger than 500 μm. Results for the 80:1 aspect ratio channel showed a significant departure from theoretical predictions. Experimental values of local Nusselt numbers were approximately 25 percent lower than predicted using macro-scale theory.


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