Endwall Heat Transfer Enhancement Around Cylinders With a Wall-Mounted Vortex Generator Pair

Abstract

Measurement of endwall heat transfer around a circular cylinder with a vortex generator pair has been investigated. Steady state liquid crystal thermography is adopted. Cylinders having two different height to diameter ratios have been employed. In one case, the cylinder has one end free in the flow and in the other case it has both ends attached on the walls. Local Nusselt numbers both upstream and downstream of the cylinder with and without the vortex generator pair are calculated. Nusselt numbers in streamwise and spanwise directions for both cases with vortex generator are compared with each other as well as with corresponding base cases. It is found from the experiments that the vortex generator influences the endwall heat transfer significantly downstream of the cylinder but has a small effect in the upstream region. Moreover, for different height to diameter ratio of the cylinder different heat transfer patterns are observed downstream of the cylinder. The vortex generator pair plays its major role on the endwall heat transfer enhancement in the spanwise direction and it expands as one moves from the upstream to downstream direction. To fully understand the advantage of the vortex generator pair, thermal performance is calculated for each case and it was found that in presence of the vortex generator pair, the cylinder with shorter height to diameter ratio shows higher thermal performance. Reynolds number dependence has also been investigated and it was found that the thermal performance decreases with increasing Reynolds number for both cases having a vortex generator pair.