Simulation of Radiation Heat Transfer of Three Dimensional Participating Media by Radiative Exchange Method

This paper describes the theoretical bases of the Radiative Exchange Method, a new numerical method for simulating radiation heat transfer. By considering radiative interaction between all points of the geometry and solving the radiation balance equation in a mesh structure coarser than the structure used in computational fluid flow calculation, this method is able to simulate radiative heat transfer in arbitrary 3D space with absorbing, emitting and scattering media surrounded by emitting, absorbing and reflecting surfaces. A new concept is introduced, that of the exchange factors between the different elements that are necessary for completing the radiative balance equation set. Using this method leads to a set of algebraic equations for the radiative outgoing power from each coarse cell being produced and the result of this set of equations was then used to calculate the volumetric radiative source term in the fine cell structure. The formulation of the exchange factor for a three-dimensional state and also a mesh size analysis that was conducted to optimize the accuracy and runtime are presented. The results of this model to simulate typical 3D furnace shape geometry, is verified by comparison with those of other numerical methods.

Effects of Exit Vent Location on Fire Room Conditions During PPV

Positive Pressure Ventilation (PPV) is a widely used fire fighting tactic in which a fan is used to push hot products of fire out of a burning structure. There is a recent body of research that has been conducted regarding the advantages and disadvantages of PPV. Studies of PPV most commonly use full scale experimental fires and/or computational simulations to evaluate its effectiveness. This paper presents computational simulations that have been conducted using Fire Dynamic Simulator (FDS) version 5 to evaluate the effects of exit vent location on resulting fire room conditions during the application of PPV to a ventilation constrained fire. The simulations use a simple one room structure with an adjacent hallway. We are simulating this geometry because we are in the process of designing and constructing a similar experimental compartment. Cold flow simulations are first conducted to understand how much the presence of the fire heat release affects the flow patterns. Then, two simulations which employ PPV with different exit vent locations are compared. The differences between the two simulations are detailed and a physical explanation for the differences is presented.

Flow Boiling Patterns of Liquid Nitrogen in Micro-Tubes

Application of liquid nitrogen to cooling is widely used in such fields as cooling of the high temperature superconducting devices, cryosurgery and so on. In order to have a full understanding of the flow and heat transfer characteristics of liquid nitrogen in micro-tube, high-speed digital photography was employed to acquire the typical flow boiling patterns of liquid nitrogen in micro-tubes in the experiments. The main flow patterns were bubbly flow, slug flow, churn flow and annular flow. And the confined bubbly flow and mist flow were also observed. These flow patterns were characterized on the flow regime maps. And the surface tension force and the size of the tube diameter were found to be the major factors affecting the flow pattern transitions.

Transient Thermal Response of Skin Tissue

The increased availability of thermal imaging cameras has led to a growing interest in the application of infrared imaging techniques to the detection and identification of subsurface structures. These imaging techniques are based on the following principle: when a surface is heated or cooled, variations in the thermal properties of a structure located underneath the surface result in identifiable temperature contours on it. These contours are characteristic of the structure’s shape, depth, and its thermal properties. We study the use of the transient thermal response of skin layers to determine to which extent the surface temperature distribution reflects the properties of subsurface structures, such as lesions. A numerical model using the finite element method is described to obtain this response and key results are reported in the paper. A sensitivity study is conducted first to better understand the thermal response of the system and the role of various system and model parameters. We explore the extent to which we are able to draw conclusions regarding the size, depth and nature of subsurface structures and accuracy of these conclusions based on the surface temperature response alone. This work validates the idea of examining the transient thermal response and using thermal imaging as a solution for lesion identification. A sensitivity study of surface temperature distribution to variations of thermophysical properties, blood perfusion rate, and thicknesses of skin layers is performed. It is observed that variations in these parameters have little impact on the surface temperature distribution. The work reported in the paper is a portion of a comprehensive research effort involving experiments on a phantom model as well as measurements on patients. Future work will focus on comparing the results of our 2D numerical modeling efforts with the experimental results using a skin tissue-mimicking phantom. Knowledge gained from the modeling and experimental efforts will be utilized in characterizing lesions in patient studies. The focus of this paper is the computational sensitivity analysis.

CFD Analysis of Batch-Type Reheating Furnace With Regeneratve Burners

A reheating furnace is a critical component in value-added steel production. These furnaces can have a significant impact on product quality and total cost. Due to the higher efficiency of regenerative burners, a growing number of reheating furnaces are using this technology. To better understand the regenerative burner operation, a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis has been conducted to examine the transient and three dimensional flow characteristics in the No.3 reheating furnace at ArcelorMittal Steelton. Simulation results with traditional burners and regenerative burners have been analyzed to understand the effect of retrofitting a furnace with these more modern burners. The temperature distribution on the billets has also been monitored throughout the simulated heating process providing insight into the optimization of billet residence time and improvement of the product quality control process.

Transient Human Thermal Comfort Response in Convective and Radiative Environments

In this work, human transient thermal responses and comfort are studied in non-uniform radiant heating and convective heating environments. The focus was on a change from walking activity of human in outdoor cold environment at high clothing insulation to warm indoor environment at sedentary activity level associated with lower clothing insulation. A transient multi-segmented bioheat model sensitive to radiant asymmetry is used to compare how fast the human body approaches steady state thermal conditions in both radiative and convective warm environments. A space thermal model is integrated with the bioheat model to predict the transient changes in skin and core temperature of a person subject to change in metabolic rate and clothing insulation when entering conditioned indoor space. It was found that overall thermal comfort and neutrality were reached in 6.2 minutes in the radiative environment compared to 9.24 minutes in convective environment. The local thermal comfort of various body segments differed in their response to the convective system where it took more than 19 minutes for extremities to reach local comfort unlike the radiative system where thermal comfort was attained within 7 minutes.

Numerical Simulation of Natural Convection Flow in a Cube With a Horizontal Heated Strip

Natural convection flow in a cube with a heated strip is solved numerically. The heated strip is attached horizontally to the front wall and maintained at high temperature, while the entire opposite wall is maintained at low temperature. The heated strip simulates an array of electronic chips The Rayleigh numbers of 104, 105, and 106 are considered in the analysis and the heated strip is horizontally attached to the wall. The results indicate that the heat transfer strongly depends on the position of the heated strip. The maximum Nusselt number can be achieved if the heater is placed at the lower half of the vertical wall. Increasing the Rayleigh number significantly promotes heat transfer in the enclosure. Flow streamlines and temperature contours are presented, and the results are validated against published works.

Study of the Gas Combustion LP in an Atmospheric Burner

The study of the gas combustion LP in an atmospheric burner to bake ceramics is presented. The study includes different models from combustion and turbulence to find the best interaction chemistry-turbulence, applying Computational Fluids Dynamics (CFD) through FLUENT®. For the study different models of combustion were considered, where the finite speed of the reaction is important by means of kinetic chemistry from Arrhenius. The different models of combustion were; a generalized model of speed of Finite Rate/Eddy dissipation, non-premixed combustion Laminar Flamelet and Eddy dissipation. Each one of these models represents the combustion non-premixed of gas LP, to simulate the combustion of turbulent diffusive flames. For the study of the turbulence the model k-epsilon was applied. The results obtained for each combination turbulence-chemistry were compared with experimental measurements of temperature within the furnace. This comparison allowed making adjustments in the modeling of the process of combustion, identifying the best interaction between combustion and turbulence. According to the obtained results, the k-epsilon model represents adequately the fluid-dynamic development of the flame within the furnace. The models of combustion Finite Rate/Eddy dissipation and Laminar Flamelet show the best approach to the experimental results, where the k-epsilon model is applied to modeling the turbulence-chemistry interaction.

An Unstructured Reacting Flow Solver With Coupled Implicit Solution of the Species Conservation Equations

Many reacting flow applications mandate coupled solution of the species conservation equations. A low-memory coupled solver was developed to solve the species transport equations on an unstructured mesh with implicit spatial as well as species-to-species coupling. First, the computational domain was decomposed into sub-domains comprised of geometrically contiguous cells—a process termed internal domain decomposition (IDD). This was done using the binary spatial partitioning (BSP) algorithm. Following this step, for each sub-domain, the discretized equations were developed using the finite-volume method, written in block implicit form, and solved using an iterative solver based on Krylov sub-space iterations, i.e., the Generalized Minimum Residual (GMRES) solver. Overall (outer) iterations were then performed to treat explicitness at sub-domain interfaces and non-linearities in the governing equations. The solver is demonstrated for a laminar ethane-air flame calculation with five species and a single reaction step, and for a catalytic methane-air combustion case with 19 species and 22 reaction steps. It was found that the best performance is manifested for sub-domain size of about 1000 cells, the exact number depending on the problem at hand. The overall gain in computational efficiency was found to be a factor of 2–5 over the block Gauss-Seidel procedure.

Velocity Field Measurements in Leading Edge Wing Compartments

For many applications the optimisation of natural convection cooling is a major design consideration due to factors such as weight, accessibility, cost and power consumption. In aircraft wing compartments, natural convection is the dominant mode of heat transfer due to high wall temperatures resulting from solar loading and heat dissipating internal electronics. This paper investigates the flow structures in a leading edge compartment subject to various thermal boundary conditions. The experimental configuration consisted of two leading edge enclosures; the first is a single compartment while the second has an attached wing box. Particle image velocimetry (PIV) was employed to obtain velocity measurements of the flow in both leading edge enclosures. The second compartment investigated the effect of an adjacent fluid filled enclosure on the flow regime in the leading edge compartment. Higher local velocities were found in the second compartment due to an increase in buoyancy forces resulting from a lower of the average fluid temperature within the compartment. The introduction of a heat dissipating component gave rise to two separate convection structures and in general increased the fluctuations in the both temperature and velocities within the compartment.