IMPROVEMENT HEAT TRANSFER UTILIZING DIFFERENT CORRUGATIONS FOR A HEATED COPPER TUBE: NUMERICAL INVESTIGATION
Author(s):
Salwa Ahmed Sarow* and Saad Najeeb Shehab
Affiliation(s):
Department of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering, Mustansiriyah University, Baghdad, Iraq
Corresponding Author Email: [email protected]
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
The helically corrugations are important methods of possessive techniques used in heat transfer enhancement applications. In this work, the numerical investigation of three-dimensional model of air flow inside a smooth and one-start helically corrugated copper tubes utilizing a commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software (SOLIDWORKS version 2020 and ANSYS Fluent version 2020 R2) are conducted. The geometrical dimensions of open-ended copper tubes like, length, inner diameter, thickness and corrugation depth are constant. Three various corrugations pitch lengths namely, 6, 12 and 18 mm are utilized. Wide range of air flow velocities from 2.5 to 4.5 m/s are utilized. The outer surface of tubes is heated electrically with various levels of heat fluxes ranging from 5000 to 10000 W/m2. The purpose of presented paper is to study and simulate numerically the effect of corrugations, air velocity and surface heat flux on the thermal and hydraulic characteristics of forced convection through an open-ended copper tube. The numerical results appear that the corrugation pitch has a large effect on convective heat dissipation. Also, the helical corrugated tube with pitch length of 6 mm gives higher thermal performance about 68 % than that smooth tube.