Search

Highlights • A helical coil with reversed loops show unique pressure drop and heat transfer characteristics. • The thermal effectiveness of a common helical coil can be improved by adding reversed loops. • Adding reversed loops may enhance turbulence mixing in helical coil heat exchanger. • New friction factor and heat transfer correlations for a helical coil with reversed loops have been postulated. Abstract In this experimental study, flow and heat transfer characteristics of water through a newly designed helical coil heat transfer test section were investigated. A structural modification of the traditional helical coil has been implemented to improve its thermal effectiveness. Specifically, a 360° plastic reversed loop was added after each 180° of the main helical coil loop to redistribute the flow’s velocity profile, which should have a direct effect on the thermal performance of the helical coil heat transfer test section. Results reveal that reversed loops do enhance heat transfer rates by more than 20%, while pressure drop penalty also increases but not at the same rate. The curvature of the reversed loops with respect to the main coil is a critical factor in terms of thermal performance. Furthermore, as the size of the reversed loop decreases, the heat transfer enhancement and pressure drop penalty increment for the modified helical coil test section increase as well. Accordingly, it is suggested that there may exist an optimum helical coil structural modification for which the best tradeoff between pressure drop penalty and heat transfer enhancement can be found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The characteristic of flow and heat transfer in double-layered microchannels with cavities and ribs is investigated numerically. The intensity of secondary flow ( Se ) and field synergy principle are used to evaluate the heat transfer performance. The results show that the effect of arrangement of cavities and ribs on friction factor and Nusselt number is obviously. The opposite cavities and aligned ribs aside the microchannel wall (Channel C) exhibit the highest intensity of secondary flow, thus resulting in the highest Nusselt number and pressure drop simultaneously. From the view point of field synergy principle, Channel C has the smallest value of field synergy angle β and the highest value of field synergy number Fc , which indicates the best synergy relationship between velocity and temperature fields. Lastly, a thermal enhanced factor is used to evaluate the comprehensive effect of flow friction and heat transfer. The thermal enhanced factor of Channel C increases with Se firstly and then decreases. The offset cavities and ribs aside the microchannel wall (Channel B) shows the best comprehensive effect in the range of Reynolds number and Se studied here. Therefore, Reasonable geometric design of double-layered microchannels must be considered to enhance heat transfer and decrease pressure drop as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The experimental investigation on thermal analysis of conical coil heat exchanger is presented in this paper. Fifteen conical coils of different cone angles (0° (helical), 45°, 90°, 135°, 180° (spiral)), with three different tube sizes (ID × OD, 8 × 10, 10 × 12 and 12 × 15) are fabricated and analysed with, same average coil diameter ( D m = 200 mm) and tube length ( L = 3 m). The experimentation is carried out with hot and cold water of flow rate 10–100 lph ( Re – 500 to 5000) and 30–90 lph respectively. The observations recorded were leads to analysis the heat exchanger for heat transfer and pressure drop characteristics at different flow rate of cold and hot fluid. The various parameters (heat transfer coefficient ( h i ), Nusselt number ( Nu ) effectiveness ( ε ) and friction factor ( f )) are estimated for the heat exchanger. The analysis indicates that, Nu and f are the functions of flow rates, tube diameter, curvature ratio and cone angle. Nu increase with increase in tube side flow rate whereas it reduces with increase in shell side flow rate, increase in cone angle and increase in tube diameter. The effects of cone angle, tube diameter and fluid flow rates on heat transfer and pressure drop characteristics are detailed in this paper. The empirical correlations are proposed to bring out the physics of the thermal aspects of the conical coil heat exchangers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microchannel heatsinks with porous media, wavy and multi-layered configurations introduce compact designs and high efficiencies in cooling applications. Current Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) based study bridges the concept by introducing a novel double layered microchannel heatsink with wavy up-down and porous ribs alongside each other. Since Artificial Neural Network (ANN) trained by CFD results reveals designs with better thermal and hydraulic performance with an insignificant computational time, ANN is employed for finding the best performers and effects of waviness on Nusselt number, pressure drop, and maximum temperature difference at the bottom of the microchannel for a Reynold number range of 100 < Re < 800 by defining a thermal efficiency factor. Even though the pressure drop increases in the wavy design, the thermal performance is affected positively. Nusselt number increases more than 55% for Re = 800. The thermal performance increases with the introduction of Dean vortices, especially at higher Re. The best design provides maximum bottom temperature difference of 1.2 °C, with a Thermal Efficiency Factor of 1.34. However, it is observed that better thermal efficiency factors are attained by using a wavy channel at the top layer and keeping the bottom layer straight for the final design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, microchannel heat sinks with symmetric and parallel wavy microchannels are studied in a wide range of Reynolds numbers from 50 to 700 via a three-dimensional fluid-solid conjugate model. The results show that the symmetric configuration yields higher Nusselt numbers than the parallel one, and it is especially true at higher Reynolds numbers and larger amplitude-to-wavelength ratios. The heat transfer enhancement can be attributed to the fact that the symmetric configuration induces four Dean vortices in the cross sections perpendicular to the flow path, whereas there are only two Dean vortices in the parallel configuration, leading to stronger coolant mixing and hence the higher Nusselt numbers in the symmetric configuration. However, because of the presence of channel throats, the symmetric configuration also achieves a significantly high pressure penalty. As a result, the overall performance of the symmetric configuration is slightly lower than that of the parallel configuration. To enhance the performance of wavy microchannel heat sinks, modified symmetric and parallel wavy configurations are proposed, in which several transverse gaps are added into ribs to connect adjacent microchannels. The results demonstrate that such a secondary branch design significantly enhances Nusselt numbers for both the parallel wavy configurations owing to the enhanced fluid mixing between adjacent microchannels. Moreover, it is found that, as compared with its original wavy configurations, secondary branches slightly increase the pressure drop across the modified parallel configuration. Thus, the overall performances are markedly enhanced for the modified parallel configurations. As expected, secondary branches greatly reduce the pressure drop across the modified symmetric configuration. Beyond expectation, the suction effect of channel throats due to secondary branches can weaken the Dean vortices in the valley vs valley regions and worsen the heat transfer performance, especially for the heat sink with larger Re and amplitude-to-wavelength ratios. As a result, the modified symmetric wavy configurations are suggested to employ with a wider gap and small amplitude-to-wavelength ratio. Generally speaking, the modified parallel wavy configuration is more dominant than the symmetric one. • Symmetric and parallel wavy microchannel heat sinks are studied numerically. • Parallel configuration shows higher Nu but larger pressure drop penalty. • Modified wavy configurations are proposed with secondary branch design. • Modified parallel configurations yield better overall performance. • Modified symmetric configuration achieves better overall performance partly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerical simulation is performed to evaluate the privilege of inserting stationary or rotating twisted tape inside a tube as a heat transfer enhancement technique. The main emphasis of this work is placed on understanding the effect of pitch distance on the hydrothermal performance of such a system. The obtained results are validated with published experimental findings. The results of numerical study shows that the heat transfer, pressure drop and total energy consumption are increased by inserting a twisted tape inside a tube. Under the stationary condition, decreasing the pitch distance results in higher Nusselt number together with more friction factor. As the twisted tape starts to rotate (RTT1 case), both Nusselt number and friction factor are further increased. However, decreasing the pitch distance from L/2 to L/6 exhibits a marginal impact on the Nusselt number and friction factor. Further increase in the angular velocity (RTT3 case), although improved the average Nusselt number, comes at the expense of much more friction factor as well as energy consumption. Considering performance evaluation criterion (PEC) as a metric to assess the interaction between heat transfer and energy consumption, it is found that rotating twisted tape is beneficial at lower Reynolds number. Among the design parameters analysed in this research, the highest PEC number of 1.5 corresponds to the case of stationary twisted tape at Reynolds number of 1000 and twisted tape pitch of L/6. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]