Heat Transfer Augmentation through Different Jet Impingement Techniques: A State-of-the-Art Review

Jet impingement is considered to be an effective technique to enhance the heat transfer rate, and it finds many applications in the scientific and industrial horizons. The objective of this paper is to summarize heat transfer enhancement through different jet impingement methods and provide a platform for identifying the scope for future work. This study reviews various experimental and numerical studies of jet impingement methods for thermal-hydraulic improvement of heat transfer surfaces. The jet impingement methods considered in the present work include shapes of the target surface, the jet/nozzle–target surface distance, extended jet holes, nanofluids, and the use of phase change materials (PCMs). The present work also includes both single-jet and multiple-jet impingement studies for different industrial applications.

Experimental Study on Droplet Impact Phenomena on Burning Liquid Pool Surfaces

In this study, the phenomena of water droplet impact on burning methanol and n-heptane pool surfaces were experimentally investigated under various size and velocity conditions of impact droplet. In the n-heptane pool, the temperature increased to the deeper location of the pool and the droplet impact velocity was slower, as compared with those in the methanol pool. These results were caused by the higher heat release rate of the n-heptane pool. However, the impact droplet sizes on the burning methanol and n-heptane pool surfaces appeared to be similar. By visualizing the droplet impact phenomena, the impact pattern maps of burning methanol and n-heptane pool surfaces were constructed and compared with the previous impact pattern maps of their unburned pool surfaces. In the burning and unburned methanol and unburned n-heptane pools, patterns of single jet and splash with secondary jet were observed. On the contrary, in the burning n-heptane pool, patterns of single jet and canopy were observed.

Towards Reconstruction of Complex Flow Fields Using Unit Flows

Many complex turbulent flows in nature and engineering can be qualitatively regarded as being constituted of multiple simpler unit flows. The objective of this work is to characterize the coherent structures in such complex flows as a combination of constituent unitary flow structures for the purpose of reduced-order representation. While turbulence is clearly a non-linear phenomenon, we aim to establish the degree to which the optimally weighted superposition of unitary flow structures can represent the complex flow structures. The rationale for investigating such superposition stems from the fact that the large-scale coherent structures are generated by underlying flow instabilities that may be reasonably described using linear analysis. Clearly, the degree of validity of superposition will depend on the flow under consideration. In this work, we take the first step toward establishing a procedure for investigating superposition. Experimental data of single and triple tandem jets in crossflow are used to demonstrate the procedure. A composite triple tandem jet flow field is generated from optimal superposition of single jet data and compared against ‘true’ triple jet data. Direct comparisons between the true and composite fields are made for spatial, temporal, and kinetic energy content. The large-scale features (obtained from proper orthogonal decomposition or POD) of true and composite tandem jet wakes exhibit nearly 70% agreement in terms of modal eigenvector correlation. Corresponding eigenvalues reveal that the kinetic energy of the flow is also emulated with only a slight overprediction. Temporal frequency features are also examined in an effort to completely characterize POD modes. The proposed method serves as a foundation for more rigorous and robust dimensional reduction in complex flows based on unit flow modes.

Numerical Analysis on the Performance of High Concentration Photovoltaic Systems Under the Nonuniform Energy Flow Density

Photovoltaic panels can directly convert solar energy into electricity, but temperature will have a certain impact on the efficiency of photovoltaic cells. Especially under the condition of nonuniform energy flow density of high-power concentration, it is of great significance to maintain the temperature uniformity of cells. Therefore, based on the radiation under nonuniform heat flux density, four heat exchangers were proposed: single-channel serpentine flow, multi-channel flat plate, full jet, and single-jet nozzle. Taking into account the uniformity of the cell temperature, the single-jet nozzle and single-channel serpentine flow can better maintain the uniformity of the temperature field compared with other heat exchangers. Especially under high-concentration energy flow density, considering the quality of heat and electricity, the performance of the four-jet nozzles is the best from the perspective of exergy efficiency. Under the condition of four-jet nozzles, the electrical efficiency and thermal efficiency of the cell can be maintained at about 29 and 62.5%, respectively, and the exergy efficiency of the system can reach 31%.

Numerical heat transfer analysis of micro-scale jet-impingement cooling in a high-pressure turbine vane

This research provides a computational analysis of heat transfer due to micro jet-impingement inside a gas turbine vane. A preliminary-parametric analysis of axisymmetric single jet was reported to better understand micro jet-impingement. In general, it was seen that as the Reynolds number increased the Nusselt number values increased. The jet to target spacing had a considerably lower impact on the heat transfer rates. Around 30% improvement was seen by reducing the diameter to half while changing the shape to an ellipse saw 20.8% improvement in Nusselt value. The numerical investigation was then followed by studying the heat transfer characteristics in a three-dimensional, actual-shaped turbine vane. Effects of jet inclination showed enhanced mixing and secondary heat transfer peaks. The effect of reducing the diameter of the jets to 0.125 mm yielded 55% heat transfer improvements compared to 0.51 mm; the tapering effect also enhanced the local heat transfer values as local velocities at jet exit increased.