Thermohydraulic transport characteristics in wavy microchannel under pulsating inlet flow condition

Abstract

The numerical investigation on developing unsteady laminar fluid flow and heat transfer inside a 2D wavy microchannel, due to sinusoidal varying velocity component at inlet is done. The thermohydraulic flow was developing while the microchannel walls were kept at constant uniform temperature. The transient solution of 2DNavier-Stokes equation was attained using the SIMPLE algorithm with the momentum interpolation technique. The deionized water is used as working fluid and Reynolds number ranging from 0.1 to 100. The simulation results reports, mainly the heat transfer and pressure drop for wavy microchannel are compared with straight microchannelby keeping the cross sectional area same. By comparing with steady flow in wavy channel it was seen that imposed sinusoidal velocity at inlet can improved performance in terms of heat transfer at different amplitude (0.2, 0.5, 0.8) and frequency (1, 5, 10) while keeping the friction factor within tolerable limits.