Pulsating flow in a heat exchanger

Abstract

The problem of heat transfer in industrial processes, heat exchangers, and combustion chambers is formulated for a case where flow inside the chamber consists of a periodic motion imposed on a fully developed turbulent flow. It is shown that the velocity pulsations induce harmonic oscillations in temperature, thus breaking the temperature field into a steady mean part and a harmonic part. The interaction between the velocity and temperature oscillations introduces an extra term into the energy equation which reflects the effect of pulsations in producing higher heat transfer rates.The analysis shows that when the mean temperature is fully developed with constant heat flux at the wall, there is no effect of the velocity pulsations on the total heat transfer rate along the chamber.For the case where the mean temperature profile is not fully developed, analytical solutions are obtained for asymptotic values of the pulsations frequency. The results show the temperature gradient and its dependence on the frequency. These results are used to evaluate the feasibility of pulsating the flow in a heat exchanger for obtaining higher rates of heat transfer.