Steady state experiments are conducted in a low speed horizontal wind tunnel under mixed convection for five discrete heat sources (aluminum) of nonidentical sizes arranged at different positions on a substrate board (bakelite) to determine the optimal configuration. The optimal configuration is one for which the maximum temperature excess (difference between the maximum temperature among the heat sources of that configuration, and the ambient temperature) is the lowest among all the other possible configurations and is determined by a heuristic nondimensional geometric parameter λ. The maximum temperature excess is found to decrease with λ, signifying an increase in heat transfer coefficient. In view of this, the configuration with highest λ is deemed to be the optimal one. The effect of surface radiation on the heat transfer characteristic of heat sources is also studied by painting their surface with black, which reduces their temperature by as much as 12%. An empirical correlation is developed for the nondimensional maximum temperature excess (θ) in terms of λ, by taking into account the effect of surface radiation. The correlation when applied for highest λ of the configuration returns the minimum value of θ at the optimal condition, which is a key engineering quantity that is sought in problems of this class.

This paper presents a methodology for obtaining the convective heat transfer coefficient from the wall of a heated aluminium plate, placed in a vertical channel filled with open cell metal foams. For accomplishing this, a thermal resistance model from literature for metal foams is suitably modified to account for contact resistance. The contact resistance is then evaluated using the experimental results. A correlation for the estimation of the contact resistance as a function of the pertinent parameters, based on the above approach is developed. The model is first validated with experimental results in literature for the asymptotic case of negligible contact resistance. A parametric study of the effect of different foam parameters on the heat transfer is reported with and without the presence of contact resistance. The significance of the effect of contact resistance in the mixed convection and forced convection regimes is discussed. The procedure to employ the present methodology in an actual case is demonstrated and verified with additional, independent experimental data.

This paper reports the results of an experimental study to determine the principal thermal conductivities (kx,ky, and kz) of an anisotropic composite medium using an inverse heat transfer analysis. The direct problem consists of solving the three dimensional heat conduction equation in an orthotropic composite medium with the finite difference method to generate the required temperature distribution for known thermal conductivities. The measurement technique involves dissipating a known heat flux at the central region of a square sample and allowing it to conductively transfer the heat to an aluminium cold plate sink via a square copper ring. At steady state, temperatures at 28 (19 are used for retrievals due to symmetry) discrete locations are logged and used for parameter estimation. The entire measurement process is conducted in a vacuum environment. The inverse heat conduction problem (IHCP) for retrieving the orthotropic thermal conductivity tensor(parameter estimation) is then solved using a two layer feed forward back propagation artificial neural network (ANN) trained using the Levenberg–Marquardt algorithm (LMA), with temperatures as input and thermal conductivity values kx,ky, and kz as the output. The method is first validated against a stainless steel(SS-304) sample of known thermal properties followed by the determination of the orthotropic conductivities of the honeycomb composite material.

Buoyancy induced flows in a partially heat generating rod bundle enclosed inside a tall cavity are investigated. First, a detailed experimental study is carried out, and the thermal hydraulics is analyzed at different power inputs and boundary cooling rates of the enclosure. Later, a generalized non-Darcy simulation is developed using a heat generating orthotropic porous media approach and is compared with the experimental results. The results of a numerical simulation for natural convection in enclosed partially heat generating rod bundles satisfactorily predict the temperature distribution within the rod bundle. Finally, a parametric study is carried out by varying the porosity (pitch to diameter ratio of the rod bundle) of the considered enclosure for the understanding of flow physics and heat transfer in such applications.

A new methodology based on least-squares approach has been developed to estimate the temperature field from an interferogram recorded using a Differential interferometer (DI). The interferograms are digitally evaluated using two dimensional Fourier transforms to retrieve the temperature gradient field. Temperature field is constructed by fitting a cubic spline to the first derivatives data. The methodology has been applied to both experimental and synthetic interferograms. Both convective heat flux and temperature field were predicted accurately. The role of image noise and errors in the temperature measurements on the temperature field estimation have been studied with the aid of synthetic interferograms.

The interaction of surface radiation and conduction with natural convection heat transfer from a vertical flat plate assembly, with an embedded heater, has been investigated, both experimentally (using differential interferometer) and numerically (using FLUENT ), in the present work. In the absence of radiation, the asymptotic limits that can be attained by the heated plate are isothermal and isoflux conditions. High values of plate thermal conductivity tend to make the surface isothermal, where as, lower values of thermal conductivity tend to make it isoflux. Irrespective of the thermal conductivity of the plate, an increase in the emissivity reduces the average temperature of the plate and brings the plate toward isothermal condition. A new methodology has also been proposed to determine the thermophysical properties, emissivity and thermal conductivity, the consistency of which is tested by carrying out experiments for various heat inputs and comparing the estimated values with those available in literature.

This paper reports the results of experimental and numerical investigations of optimal heat distribution among the protruding heat sources under laminar conjugate mixed convection heat transfer in a vertical duct. A printed circuit board with 15 heat sources forms a wall of a duct. Three-dimensional governing equations of flow and heat transfer were solved in the flow domain along with the energy equation in the solid domain using FLUENT 6.3 . A database of temperatures of each of the heat sources for different heat distributions is generated numerically. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) were used as a forward model to replace the time consuming complex computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. The functional relationship between heat input distribution and the corresponding temperatures of the heat sources obtained by training the network is used to drive a genetic algorithm based optimization procedure to determine the optimal heat distribution. The optimal distribution here refers to the apportioning of a fixed quantity of heat among 15 heat sources, keeping the maximum of the temperatures of the heat sources to a minimum. Furthermore, the heat distribution corresponding to a set of specified target temperatures of the heat sources is obtained using a network that is trained and tested with a database of temperatures of the heat sources generated using FLUENT 6.3 in the range of total heat dissipation of 5–25 W. Using this network, it was possible to maximize the total heat dissipation from the heat sources for a given target temperature directly. In order to validate the optimization method, a low speed vertical wind tunnel has been used to carry out the mixed convection experiments for different combinations of heat distribution and also for the optimal heat distribution, and the temperatures of the heat sources were measured. The results of the numerical simulations, ANN, and the corresponding experimental results are in good agreement.

Transient cooling experiments of a heated vertical aluminum plate with an embedded heater, in quiescent air, were conducted for the simultaneous estimation of total hemispherical emissivity and specific heat of the plate material. During cooling, the heat loss from the hot plate by natural convection and radiation was taken into account. During the experiments, plate temperatures were recorded at several locations using a data acquisition system. A numerically computed transient response of the plate is then compared with the experimentally known transient response to estimate the residual, the minimization of which using Levenberg–Marquardt’s iterative procedure retrieves the parameters pertinent to the problem. The experiments were conducted for three different surface emissivities of the plate obtained by using suitable surface treatment. A consistency test for the present approach was also done by conducting transient heating experiments using the retrieved values of parameters and a comparison of simulated and calculated natural convection heat transfer coefficients as a function of temperature. The experiments have been performed over a temperature range of 320 – 430 K and a Rayleigh number range of 2 × 10 6 – 2 × 10 7 . The emissivity values are in good agreement with previous reported results.

A quasi-one-dimensional ablation analysis for a sharp-nosed, reusable, re-entry vehicle that could possibly be used in an unmanned space program, has been carried out by using an in-house code. The code is based on the boundary immobilization technique and the solution has been obtained using the tri-diagonal matrix algorithm (TDMA). The heat fluxes on the spherical nose cap that are used to determine the ablation rate of a thermal coating applied over the surface of the vehicle are obtained by performing a steady state aero-thermodynamic analysis. The aero-thermodynamic analysis for the viscous, compressible flow under consideration is carried out by using FLUENT 6.2. The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations are performed at three locations on the trajectory that the vehicle follows, on re-entry. These simulations yield the temperature and heat flux distributions along the surface of the vehicle and the latter are given as input to the ablation code. The shell material of the vehicle is assumed to be zirconium boride ( Zr B 2 ) . The code is validated with benchmark cases and the flow and heat transfer characteristics are also discussed. In brief, the present work presents a methodology for coupling an ablation code with CFD simulations from a commercial code, to study the effect of change of the nose region on the ablation process.

An inverse radiation analysis for simultaneous estimation of the radiative properties and the surface emissivities for a participating medium in between infinitely long parallel planes, from the knowledge of the measured temperatures and heat fluxes at the boundaries, is presented. The differential discrete ordinate method is employed to solve the radiative transfer equation. The present analysis considers three types of simple scattering phase functions. The inverse problem is solved through minimization of a performance function, which is expressed by the sum of squares of residuals between calculated and observed temperatures and heat fluxes at the boundaries. To check the performance and accuracy in retrieval, a comparison is presented between four retrieval methods, viz. Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm, genetic algorithm, artificial neural network, and the Bayesian algorithm. The results of the present analyses indicate that good precision in retrieval could be achieved by using only temperatures and heat fluxes at the boundaries. The study shows that the radiative properties of medium and surface emissivities can be retrieved even with noisy data using Bayesian retrieval algorithm and artificial neural network. Also, the results demonstrate that genetic algorithms are not efficient but are quite robust. Additionally, it is observed that an increase in the error in measurements significantly deteriorates the retrieval using the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm.

Permeability ( K ) and form coefficient ( C ) are the characteristic hydraulic properties of any porous medium. They are determined simultaneously, for known fluid thermo-physical properties by using the Hazen-Dupuit-Darcy model (HDD) to curve-fit the longitudinal global pressure-drop versus average fluid speed data from an isothermal, steady flow, hydraulic experiment across a test section of the porous medium. The K and C thus measured are global parameters, i.e., valid for the entire porous medium and universal provided the flow throughout the porous medium is of plug flow nature. We report here experimental evidence on the influence of non-plug flow velocity profiles at the inlet, on the simultaneous determination of K and C of fissure- and rod bundle-type porous inserts. Although variation in K is minimal, as much as 12.1% variation in C is observed, when going from a fully developed velocity profile to a plug flow profile at the inlet.

Hydrodynamic experiments measuring longitudinal pressure-drop versus flow rate are conducted for turbulent flow of air (channel hydraulic diameter based Reynolds number range of 2300 to 6860) through near-compact heat exchanger models with rod bundles having aligned (inline) arrangement. Effects of the flow (Re), the geometry parameters, and number of rods of the test models on the nondimensional pressure-drop ξ are studied in detail. Treating the near compact heat exchanger model as a porous medium, a dimensional pressure-drop Δ P / L versus average velocity of flow (U) model similar in content to a non-Darcy porous medium model, is shown to fit the experimental data with fair accuracy. Variation in form drag related to, and induced by the flow and geometric parameters are shown to be the reason for the pressure-drop variations of different models. The relation between the porous medium type model ( Δ P / L versus U) and the “ξ versus Re” model is discussed with careful attention to the differences in the two transitions viz. laminar to turbulent and viscous-drag to form-drag dominated flow inside the models. A proposed correlation for predicting ξ, ably capturing all of the form effects induced by the flow and geometric parameters, is found to give predictions with ±20% accuracy.

Results of an experimental study of natural convection and surface radiation between three parallel vertical plates, symmetrically spaced, with air as the intervening medium are presented. The analysis consists of heating the central plate at different levels and recording the temperatures of both the central and the side plates at steady state conditions. Based on the measurements, a correlation for the maximum temperature excess of the “hot” plate in terms of the emissivity of the central and the side plates, the aspect ratio, and the dimensionless total heat flux is given, valid for a range of emissivity 0.05 ⩽ ε c , ε s ⩽ 0.85 , aspect ratio 2.38 ⩽ A ⩽ 17 , and total heat flux 32 ⩽ q ⩽ 1590 W / m 2 . Through this, the heat transfer enhancement due to radiation has been succinctly brought out.

A numerical study has been made to analyze the effects of anisotropic permeability and thermal diffusivity on natural convection in a heat generating porous medium contained in a vertical cylindrical enclosure with isothermal wall and the top and bottom perfectly insulated surfaces. The results show that the anisotropies influence the flow field and heat transfer rate significantly. The non-dimensional maximum cavity temperature increases with increase in permeability ratio. For aspect ratio greater than or equal to two, the nondimensional maximum cavity temperature increases with an increase in the thermal diffusivity ratio. For aspect ratio equal to unity, there exists a critical value of thermal diffusivity ratio at which the maximum cavity temperature is a minimum. This critical value increases with an increase in the value of anisotropic permeability ratio. Based on a parametric study correlations for maximum cavity temperature and average Nusselt number are presented.

The results of a numerical study of the problem of two-dimensional, steady, incompressible, conjugate, laminar, mixed convection with surface radiation from a vertical plate with a flush-mounted discrete heat source are reported. The governing equations, written in vorticity-stream function form, are solved using a finite-volume based finite difference method. A hybrid grid system has been employed for discretization of the computational domain. The effects of (i) the magnitude and location of the heat source, (ii) the material and surface properties of the plate, and (iii) the free-stream velocity on both heat transfer and fluid flow have been studied. Based on a large set of (more than 550) numerical data, correlations have been developed for maximum and average non-dimensional plate temperatures and mean friction coefficient. A method for evaluating the forced convection mean friction coefficient component, which may be used in estimating the power input required for maintaining the flow, has been proposed.

The heat transfer across an air-filled partitioned square enclosure is studied experimentally using a differential interferometer. The partition was located centrally inside the enclosure, parallel to the two isothermal differentially heated vertical walls, and extended the full height of the enclosure. The top and bottom horizontal walls of the enclosure were maintained adiabatic. A parametric study has been carried out using different partitions, focusing attention on the effect of partition thermal resistance as well as the interaction of surface radiation and natural convection, and on the total heat transfer between the vertical walls, inside the enclosure. Correlations, valid for the laminar range, are proposed.