Thermal‐fluid transport phenomena in strongly heated channel flows

Abstract

A theoretical study is performed to investigate transport phenomena in channel flows under uniform heating from either both side walls or a single side. The anisotropic t^2¯− ε_t heat‐transfer model is employed to determine thermal eddy diffusivity. The governing boundary‐layer equations are discretized by means of a control volume finite‐difference technique and numerically solved using a marching procedure. It is found that under strong heating from both walls, laminarization occurs as in the circular tube flow case; during the laminarization process, both the velocity and temperature gradients in the vicinity of the heated walls decrease along the flow, resulting in a substantial attenuation in both the turbulent kinetic energy and the temperature variance over the entire channel cross section; both decrease causes a deterioration in heat transfer performance; and in contrast, laminarization is suppressed in the presence of one‐side‐heating, because turbulent kinetic energy is produced in the vicinity of the other insulated wall.

Citation

Torii, S. and Yang, W. (2000), "Thermal‐fluid transport phenomena in strongly heated channel flows", International Journal of Numerical Methods for Heat & Fluid Flow, Vol. 10 No. 8, pp. 802-823. https://doi.org/10.1108/09615530010359111