Hydro-thermal characteristics of flow of different corrugated channels: Experimental and numerical approaches

Abstract

Corrugated surfaces are an efficient design feature found in many applications in industrial and engineering fields, such as electronic device cooling systems, used to improve heat transfer rates. However, the high pressure drop through them strongly impacts on systems overall thermal performance. The current study first reports experimentally the entropy generation in laminar flow forced convection heat transfer inside a sinusoidal corrugated channel and then numerically extended with additional proposed channel configurations to compare the different profiles with the straight profile. For Reynolds numbers between 512.6 and 1534.8 and a heat flux of 2.8 and 5.73 kW/m2, the main findings of experimental results are displayed in terms of the average Nusselt number, temperature distribution, pressure drop, friction factor, and total entropy generation. Experimental results revealed a maximum value of average Nusselt number of 6.067 and a total entropy generation of 0.556 W/K at Re = 1534.8. It was also found numerically with the same range of Reynolds numbers as the experimental investigation that both sinusoidal and triangular corrugated channels can augment the average Nusselt number by 51 % and 27 % compared to the straight channel, respectively.The sinusoidal corrugated channel performance factor of 1.045 was obtained at Re = 1534.8.