Enhancement of Natural Convection Heat Transfer Rate in Internal Compressible Flows by Inserting Stationary Inserts

Enhancement of the natural and forced convection heat transfer has been the subject of numerous academic and industrial studies. Air blenders, mechanical agitators, and static mixers have been developed to increase the forced convection heat transfer rate in compressible and incompressible flows. Stationary inserts can be efficiently employed as heat transfer enhancement device in the natural convection systems with compressible flow. Generally, a stationary heat transfer enhancement insert consists of a number of equal motionless units, placed on the inside of a pipe or channel in order to control flowing fluid streams. These devices have low maintenance and operating costs, low space requirements and no moving parts. A range of designs exists for a wide range of specific applications. The shape of the elements determines the character of the fluid motion and thus determines thermal effectiveness of the insert. There are several key parameters that may be considered in the design procedure of a heat transfer enhancement insert, which lead to significant differences in the performance of various designs. An ideal insert for natural conventional heat transfer of compressible flow applications provides a higher rate of heat transfer and a thermally homogenous fluid with minimized pressure drop and required space. To choose an insert for a given application or in order to design a new insert, besides experimentation, it is possible to use computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools to study insert performance. This paper presents the outcomes of the numerical studies by the authors on an industrial stationary heat transfer enhancement insert and illustrates how a heat transfer enhancement insert can improve the heat transfer in a buoyancy driven compressible flow. The numerical predictions were validated using experimental data. Using different measuring tools, the global performance of the insert and the impact of the geometrical parameters are studied in order to choose the most effective design for a given application.