ABSTRACT

EXPERIMENTAL AND NUMERICAL INVESTIGATION OF FLUID FLOW AND HEAT TRANSFER IN MICROCHANNELS Microchannels are of current interest for use in heat exchangers where very high heat transfer performance is desired. Microchannels provide very high heat transfer coefficients because of their small hydraulic diameters. In this study, an investigation of fluid flow and heat transfer in microchannels is conducted. A review of the literature published regarding fluid flow and heat transfer in microchannels is provided in this study. A thorough background on the theory of internal convective heat transfer is provided as well. A critical analysis of some of the published heat transfer experiments on microchannels is also given. It was found that some of the experimental methods published recently employ experimental and data reduction techniques which may result in errors for reported Nusselt numbers. A brief computational fluid dynamics (CFD) investigation into the heat transfer and fluid flow performance of some channels with designed bumps is also presented. It was found that designed channels offer enhanced Nusselt numbers in high Reynolds Number at the cost of a higher friction factor.

In view of above discussions, the major objectives of the present work are stated as follows:

1. To carry out a comprehensively literature survey on the present status of Microchannel Analysis. 2. To study Microchannel heat exchanger convective heat transfer co-efficient.

3. To carry out CFD and Experimental analysis to study the flow and heat transfer and comparing the results.

The MANIFOLD is designed in such that, it should give the uniform velocity to all 10 channels, to make the assumptions match with the actual. Microchannel and manifold are created in CATIA. The model is imported into GAMBIT to create the mesh. The mesh file is imported to FLUENT and the boundary conditions are applied. The CFD simulation is done on the model.

Fluid flow and heat transfer experiments were conducted on an Aluminum microchannel heat exchanger (MHE). An experimental method of imposing a constant heat flux to the MHE was used. A description of the experimental apparatus and procedure is provided.

The hydrodynamic length is calculated. The flow is fully developed and the formulae for further can be assumed from fully developed conditions. The results from the CFD simulation and Experiment are compared, but the results from the experiment are scattered. Nusselt number was calculated for a Reynolds number range of 28 to 291. The convective heat transfer coefficient from the experiment agrees with the CFD results. The convective heat transfer coefficient also increases as Nusselt Number increases. The Outlet temperatures of the experimental results are showed excellent agreement with the CFD results in the high Reynolds Number regime.