A New Realistic Approach To Convective Heat Transfer Modeling And Simulation In The Presence Of Swirling Flows

Abstract

The thesis deals with internal fluid flows with heat transfer where swirl is a dominant component. The modeling of these flows is important due to their wide prevalence in industrial processes. The use of appropriate turbulence models for swirling flows and verification is performed in the chapter 2. Chapters 3 and 4 deals with applications with swirling flows. This includes the cooling and thermal management of a PCR machine and studying the thermal and flow behavior of fluid flows in large pipes under directly ducted fan flows. Fluid flow was visualized with both normalized and non-normalized vector plots while temperature contour plots and turbulence ratio contour plots were utilized to delineate the various thermal and fluid flow regimes which were encountered. The simulations were all carried out in ANSYS – CFX predominantly using versions 14 through 16. The results demonstrated the need for further adoption of the SST turbulence model especially in flows where swirl was a significant factor.