Effects of the Conjugate Heat Transfer and Heat Flux Strength on the Thermal Characteristics of Impinging Jets

Abstract

A numerical study using the conjugate heat transfer approach has been performed to investigate the effects of boundary heat flux, conduction effect, and working fluid on the thermal characteristics due to the jet impingement process. Air and water are used in this study as working fluids. For the water jet, the volume of fluid method is used to capture and track the interface in the multiphase flow. It is found that the wall conduction may change the fluid-solid interfacial thermal characteristics compared with no conduction or pure convection process. The amount of influence depends on the working fluid, nozzle size, metal thermal conductivity, metal thickness, and boundary heat flux. The conduction inside the solid wall tends to reorganize the uniform heat flux distribution at the boundary to a non-uniform heat flux distribution at the fluid-solid interface. This is mainly attributed to the conjugate effect of the solid. For a given jet Reynolds number and boundary heat flux, the conjugate heat transfer results divulge that the convective heat flux removed from the stagnation point is higher for the air jet than for the water jet. Contrary to the air jet, the effect of thermal boundary on the stagnation Nusselt number profile is negligible for the water jet. The disc material and thickness have no obvious effect on the stagnation Nusselt number profile for both air and water fluids.