Enhanced heat transfer using oscillatory flows in solar collectors

Abstract

In this work, we propose the use of oscillatory laminar flows to enhance the transfer of heat from solar collectors. The idea is to explore the possibility of transferring the heat collected from a solar device to a storage tank by means of a zero-mean oscillating fluid contained in a tube. This method takes advantage of the fact that the effective thermal diffusivity of a fluid in oscillatory motion is several orders of magnitude higher than the fluid molecular diffusivity. Therefore, the axial transport of heat along the tube is substantially higher when the fluid oscillates than when the fluid is static. Also, preliminary estimations show a dramatic heat transfer enhancement using oscillatory flows compared with the forced convection of heat by standard unidirectional flows. We explore the behavior of the effective thermal diffusivity using both Newtonian and viscoelastic fluids. For the Newtonian fluid a single maximum value of this quantity is exhibited for a given oscillation frequency. In contrast, several maxima for different resonant frequencies are observed for the viscoelastic fluid. Further, the absolute maximum of the enhanced thermal diffusivity for the viscoelastic fluid is several orders of magnitude larger than that of the Newtonian fluid.