Development of a Heat Transfer Correlation for the Transitional Flow in a Horizontal Tube Using Support Vector Machines

Abstract

In this paper the Support Vector Machines (SVM) method is used to correlate the transitional forced and mixed convection experimental data of Ghajar and Tam (1994) that were obtained along a stainless steel horizontal circular tube fitted with re-entrant, square-edged, and bell-mouth inlets under uniform wall heat flux boundary condition. The SVM method has been chosen to further improve the accuracy of the correlations that were developed by Ghajar and his co-workers using the traditional least-squares method (Ghajar and Tam, 1994) and more recently the artificial neural networks (ANN) method (Ghajar et al., 2004). Using the ANN method improved the accuracy of their correlation. However, there are drawbacks associated with ANN method. One of the major problems with the ANN method is that it does not provide a unique correlation due to different coefficient matrices. The SVM method used in this study eliminated the drawbacks associated with the ANN method and provided a unique correlation with comparable accuracy as the ANN method. For the experimental data used, majority of the data points were predicted within 5% deviation. Comparisons were made regarding the accuracy of the developed correlation and its characteristic using SVM and ANN methods. The results showed that SVM is a good method to correlate complex heat transfer data.