On Computational Heat Transfer in Industrial Applications

Industrial energy systems involve many components where fluid flow, heat and mass transfer are the important transport processes. For design and development as well as investigation of innovative ideas, computational methods are of vital importance. Since the early pioneering works (by, e.g., the Spalding group) in the 1960s and 1970s, the development has been tremendous and nowadays CFD (computational fluid dynamics) is an established methodology. During the same time period computer capacities in addition have been brought extensively forward. Although still many topics need further development, applications to industrial problems are constantly increasing. In this paper examples of computational heat transfer, fluid flow and related transport phenmena applied to plate heat exchangers (PHEs), gas turbine heat transfer, and fuel cells are highlighted.