Enhancement of heat transfer using turbulent wall jet

Abstract

Enhancement of heat transfer is very important in many engineering applications. The present study explores one of such possibilities by increasing the surface area of a plane wall. The effect of wavy wall on thermal and flow characteristics of a turbulent wall jet is studied in detail. The amplitude of the wavy surface is varied between 0.1 and 0.7 with an interval of 0.1. The Reynolds number is set to 15,000. The Reynolds averaged Navier Stokes equations are solved using the finite volume approach. The semi-implicit pressure linked equation algorithm is used to couple the pressure and velocity. A new scale, other than the traditional outer scaling, is defined for carrying out the self-similar behavior of the flow. Unlike the plane wall case, the self-similar characteristic is obtained at the respective crests and the troughs. However, it is also noticed that the two characteristics differ significantly with each other. Even, these characteristics are found to differ with each other for different amplitudes. The minimum pressure near the nozzle decreases as the amplitude increases and it is noted to be equal to −0.541 for the highest amplitude, i.e. A = 0.7. It is observed that the strength of convection near the exit of the jet is very high, and it decreases in the downstream direction. This increase in convection augments heat transfer by almost 10% as compared to the plane wall case. Based on the results, a quartic curve is fit for the average Nusselt number with a 99.75% goodness of fit. It is expected that the present study opens a new line in designing a proper cooling system.