Viscous Dissipation and Rarefaction Effects on Laminar Forced Convection in Microchannels

2010 ◽  
Vol 132 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
Arman Sadeghi ◽  
Mohammad Hassan Saidi

Fluid flow in microchannels has some characteristics, which one of them is rarefaction effect related with gas flow. In the present work, hydrodynamically and thermally fully developed laminar forced convection heat transfer of a rarefied gas flow in two microgeometries is studied, namely, microannulus and parallel plate microchannel. The rarefaction effects are taken into consideration using first-order slip velocity and temperature jump boundary conditions. Viscous heating is also included for either the wall heating or the wall cooling case. Closed form expressions are obtained for dimensionless temperature distribution and Nusselt number. The results demonstrate that for both geometries, as Brinkman number increases, the Nusselt number decreases. However, the effect of viscous heating on the Nusselt number at greater values of Knudsen number becomes insignificant. In the absence of viscous heating, increasing values of Knudsen number lead to smaller values of Nusselt number. Furthermore, it is observed that viscous heating causes singularities in Nusselt number values. Also, asymmetry causes singularities in Nusselt numbers of both microannulus walls and the parallel plate wall having lower heat flux, even in the absence of viscous heating. For parallel plate microchannel, in the absence of viscous heating, Nusselt number of the wall having larger heat flux is an increasing function of the wall heat fluxes ratio.

Author(s):  
Masoud Darbandi ◽  
Ghasem Mosayebi

As the use of MEMS-based devices and systems are continuously increasing, the understanding of their correct characteristics becomes so serious for the related researches. In this study, the supersonic rarefied gas flow over microscale hotwires is investigated using the Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method. Indeed, the DSMC has been accepted as a powerful method to study the rarefied gas flow especially in transitional regime. Therefore, it can be considered as a reliable method to investigate the rarefied supersonic flow over microscale objects including the microscale hotwires. In this work, we study the effective parameters, which affect the performance of these sensors at constant sensor surface temperature conditions. We use our developed DSMC code to perform our investigation. This code uses the DSMC algorithm to solve the rarefied gas flow on unstructured grid distributions. To validate our developed DSMC code, we solve the supersonic rarefied gas flow and heat transfer in microchannel considering different Knudsen number magnitudes. Comparing the achieved flow and heat transfer solutions with other available results and data reported on microchannel studies, we verify the accuracy of achieved results. Next we focus on hotwire sensor, which often consists of the combinations of different long narrow circular cylinders. We study the effects of grid resolution, time step size, and the number of simulated particles on the obtained results. We further study the effects of sensor temperature and sensor diameter on the sensor thermal performance. The achieved results indicate that the surface heat flux performs very similarly in different studied cases. For example, the achieved local Nusselt number distributions around the circular sensor show that the surface heat flux would gradually increase from the sensor stagnation point to its rear end as the temperature gradient increases. It reaches to a maximum magnitude and it then starts decreasing resulting in effective heat flux reduction. Finally, there is a low pressure zone at the rear side of cylinder, which is not considerably affected by the flow properties. The results also show that if the wire surface temperature increases, the Nusselt number would reduce. However, the amount of Nusselt Number reduction rate would decrease as the temperature increases. Furthermore, the results show that the Reynolds number decreases and the Knudsen number increases as the sensor diameter decreases, which is due to the transitional regime behavior. As is known, the flow at boundaries change the condition from the slip to transitional regime when the Knudsen number increases sufficiently; and the flow become rarefied. There is a reduction in the total heat flux rate as the sensor diameter is reduced.


Author(s):  
Arman Sadeghi ◽  
Abolhassan Asgarshamsi ◽  
Mohammad Hassan Saidi

Microscale fluid dynamics has received intensive interest due to the emergence of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technology. Fluid flow in microdevices has some characteristics which one of them is rarefaction effect related with gas flow. In this work, the steady state laminar rarefied gas flow in the entrance region of parallel plate microchannels is investigated by the integral method with slip flow conditions at solid surface. The effects of Knudsen number on friction factor and Nusselt number are presented in graphical form as well as analytical form. Also the effect of Knudsen number on hydrodynamic entry length is presented. The results show that as Knudsen number increases the local friction factor and Nusselt number decrease. Also an increment of Knudsen number leads to a larger amount of hydrodynamic entry length.


Author(s):  
Arman Sadeghi ◽  
Abolhassan Asgarshamsi ◽  
Mohammad Hassan Saidi

Fluid flow and heat transfer at microscale have attracted an important research interest in recent years due to the rapid development of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). Fluid flow in microdevices has some characteristics which one of them is rarefaction effect related with gas flow. In this research, hydrodynamically and thermally fully developed laminar rarefied gas flow in annular microducts is studied using slip flow boundary conditions. Two different cases of the thermal boundary conditions are considered, namely: uniform temperature at the outer wall and adiabatic inner wall (Case A) and uniform temperature at the inner wall and adiabatic outer wall (Case B). Using the previously obtained velocity distribution, energy conservation equation subjected to relevant boundary conditions is numerically solved using fourth order Runge-Kutta method. The Nusselt number values are presented in graphical form as well as tabular form. It is realized that for the case A increasing aspect ratio results in increasing the Nusselt number, while the opposite is true for the case B. The effect of aspect ratio on Nusselt number is more notable at smaller values of Knudsen number, while its effect becomes slighter at large Knudsen numbers. Also increasing Knudsen number leads to smaller values of Nusselt number for the both cases.


2004 ◽  
Vol 126 (5) ◽  
pp. 836-839 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. H. Nie and ◽  
B. F. Armaly

Simulations of three-dimensional laminar forced convection in a plane symmetric sudden expansion are presented for Reynolds numbers where the flow is steady and symmetric. A swirling “jetlike” flow develops near the sidewalls in the separating shear layer, and its impingement on the stepped wall is responsible for the maximum that develops in the Nusselt number adjacent to the sidewalls and for the reverse flow that develops in that region. The maximum Nusselt number on the stepped wall is located inside the primary recirculation flow region and its location does not coincide with the jetlike flow impingement region. The results reveal that the location where the streamwise component of wall shear stress is zero on the stepped walls does not coincide with the outer edge of the primary recirculation flow region near the sidewalls.


Author(s):  
M. Fakoor-Pakdaman ◽  
M. Andisheh-Tadbir ◽  
Majid Bahrami

A new all-time model is developed to predict transient laminar forced convection heat transfer inside a circular tube under arbitrary time-dependent heat flux. Slug flow condition is assumed for the velocity profile inside the tube. The solution to the time-dependent energy equation for a step heat flux boundary condition is generalized for arbitrary time variations in surface heat flux using a Duhamel’s integral technique. A cyclic time-dependent heat flux is considered and new compact closed-form relationships are proposed to predict: i) fluid temperature distribution inside the tube ii) fluid bulk temperature and iii) the Nusselt number. A new definition, cyclic fully-developed Nusselt number, is introduced and it is shown that in the thermally fully-developed region the Nusselt number is not a function of axial location, but it varies with time and the angular frequency of the imposed heat flux. Optimum conditions are found which maximize the heat transfer rate of the unsteady laminar forced-convective tube flow. We also performed an independent numerical simulation using ANSYS to validate the present analytical model. The comparison between the numerical and the present analytical model shows great agreement; a maximum relative difference less than 5.3%.


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