Comparative studies on the effect of duct height on heat transfer and flow behavior between co-angular and co-rotating type finned surface

Abstract

This paper presents the comparative studies on the effect of duct height on heat transfer and flow behavior between co-angular and co-rotating type finned surface in duct. Experiments were performed to investigate the effect of duct height on heat transfer enhancement of a surface affixed with arrays (7 × 7) of short rectangular plate fins of a co-angular and a co-rotating type pattern in the duct. An infrared imaging system with the camera of TVS 8000 was used to measure the temperature distributions to calculate the local heat transfer coefficients of the representative fin regions. Pressure drop and heat transfer experiments were performed for both types of fin pattern varying the duct to fin height ratio (Hd/Hf) of 2.0–5.0. The friction factor calculated from the pressure drop shows that friction factor decreases with increasing the duct to fin height ratio (Hd/Hf) regardless of fin pattern and this is expected because the larger friction occurs for smaller duct to fin height ratios. Detailed heat transfer distribution gives a clear picture of heat transfer characteristics of the overall surface as well as the influence of the duct height. In addition, different flow behavior and flow structure developed by both patterns were visualized by the smoke flow visualization technique.