Laminar mixed convection in a two-dimensional symmetrically and partially heated vertical channel is investigated. The heaters are located on both walls and uniform temperature is applied on the heated sections. The number of heaters is considered as 1, 4, 8, and 10. Aluminum oxide/water nanofluid is considered as working fluid and the inlet velocity is uniform. The continuity, momentum and energy equations with appropriate boundary conditions are solved in dimensionless form, numerically. The study is performed for Richardson number of 0.01 and 10, Reynolds number of 100 and 500, and nanofluid volume fraction of 0% and 5%. Based on the obtained velocity and temperature distributions, the local and mean Nusselt number is calculated and plotted for different cases. The variation of the mean Nusselt number with the number of the heated portions is also discussed. It is found that the addition of nanoparticles into the base fluid increases mean Nusselt number but the rate of increase depends on Reynolds, Richardson numbers and number of heated portions. It is possible to increase mean Nusselt number 138% by increasing Reynolds number from 100 to 500, Richardson number from 0.01 to 10 and number of heated portions from 1 to 10 when volume fraction value is 5%.
In this study, heat transfer in a square cavity filled with a Phase Change Material (PCM) under a sinusoidal wall temperature during solidification and melting is analyzed. All surfaces of the cavity are insulated except one surface, which is under the sinusoidal temperature change. The governing equations and boundary conditions are made dimensionless to reduce the number of governing parameters into two as dimensionless frequency and Stefan number. The governing equations were solved numerically by using Finite Volume Method for a wide range of Stefan number (0.1 < Ste < 1.0) and dimensionless frequency (0.23 < < 2.04). Based on the obtained results, a chart in terms of Stefan number and dimensionless frequency is obtained to divide the heat transfer process in the cavity into three regions as uncompleted, completed, and overheated phase-change processes. For the uncompleted process, some parts of the cavity are inactive, and no phase change occurs in those parts of the cavity during the melting and freezing process. For the overheated phase change, the temperature of the cavity highly increases (or decreases), causing the sensible heat storage to compete with latent thermal storage. In the completed process, almost all thermal storage is done by the utilization of latent heat. The suggested graph helps thermal designers to avoid wrong designs and predict the type of thermal storage (sensible or latent) in the cavity without doing any computations.
2 October 2018 in Numerical Heat Transfer, Part A: Applications
Volume averaged thermal transport properties of two metal foams with 10 and 20 PPI are obtained by using microtomography technique. The digital 3D structures of samples are generated in computer environment. The governing equations are solved for the entire domain and the volume averaged technique is used to determine interfacial heat transfer coefficient, longitudinal and transverse thermal dispersion conductivity. The study is performed for the pore scale Reynolds number from 100 to 600. The obtained results are within the ranges of the suggested correlations in literature. The present study supports the correlations suggested by Calmidi and Mahajan (2000) and Zhang et al. (2016).