Heat flow through a thin cooled pipe filled with a micropolar fluid

Abstract

In this paper, a non-isothermal flow of a micropolar fluid in a thin pipe with circular cross-section is considered. The fluid in the pipe is cooled by the exterior medium and the heat exchange on the lateral part of the boundary is described by Newton's cooling condition. Assuming that the hydrodynamic part of the system is provided, we seek for the micropolar effects on the heat flow using the standard perturbation technique. Different asymptotic models are deduced depending on the magnitude of the Reynolds number with respect to the pipe thickness. The critical case is identified and the explicit approximation for the fluid temperature is built improving the known result for the classical Newtonian flow as well. The obtained results are illustrated by some numerical simulations.