This Special Issue of Heat Transfer Engineering includes ten selected papers from the 15th UK Heat Transfer Conference, which was held at Brunel University London on 4th to 5th September 2017. The conference series, organized under the egis of the UK National Heat Transfer Committee, has its origins in 1984 when it was hosted at University of Leeds. Today it is widely considered the premier forum in the UK for the local and international heat transfer community to meet, disseminate ongoing work and discuss the latest advances in the Heat Transfer field.
The 15th Edition of the conference was Chaired by Professor Tassos Karayiannis and co-chaired by Dr. Carola König and Dr. Francesco Coletti. The conference was opened by Professor Geoff Rogers, Brunel University’s Deputy Vice Chancellor for Research & Innovation, who provided an overview of the current research funding developments in the UK. This was followed by a tribute to the memory of the late Professor D. B. Spalding (Imperial College London) by Professor Brian Launder (University of Manchester).
Three invited keynote lectures were delivered by Professor Peter Stephan of Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany on the “Influence of wetting and dewetting phenomena on evaporative heat transfer”; Professor Harvey Thompson from the University of Leeds on “Computational Approaches in Heat Transfer Optimization” and Mr. Martin Gough of Calgavin Ltd. on “Improving the Operational Performance of Existing Heat Exchangers used in the Hydrocarbon Processing Industries”.
The scientific program consisted of 100 oral presentations and 20 posters dealing with various aspects of heat transfer. The conference was well attended from both academia and industry, with the participation of over 140 scientific delegates from 28 different countries. The industrial contribution (including papers authored or coauthored by Rolls Royce, BP, Repsol, Calgavin and Hexxcell amongst others) was particularly well received and a number of exhibitors displayed their technologies. The conference provided once again a lively environment for the Heat Transfer community to meet and exchange ideas.
The choice of the papers selected to appear in this Special Issue reflects the diversity of topics presented at the conference, ranging from fundamentals to applications, from experimental to modeling, from the microscale to the macroscale. The papers in this Special Issue illustrate the breadth and depth of the research being performed by the UK and the international Heat Transfer community, starting at the microscale from studies on droplets evaporation, touching on experiments in metal foams, modeling of heat exchangers all the way to industrial scale applications in refinery heat exchanger networks. The ten papers included in this Special Issue were edited by Professor Afshin Ghajar, Editor-in-Chief of Heat Transfer Engineering.
The first two papers focus on droplet evaporation. Tekidou et al. from the University of Edinburgh, report on “Wetting phenomena observed in evaporating droplets on structured surfaces” while the second paper, “Drop evaporation on rough hot-spots: effect of wetting modes” provides some of the results obtained from the international collaboration of two UK and two Japanese universities.
The third paper, “Nanotextured aluminum-based surfaces with icephobic properties” by Grizen et al., in collaboration between University College London and Airbus shows the development of surface treatments capable of a significant reduction in ice nucleation temperatures.
The fourth paper is by Righetti et al. and reports the results of another international collaboration, this time between the University of Padova in Italy, the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium and the University of Queensland in Australia. The paper reports on the experimental study of pool boiling across aluminum foams.
The fifth paper takes us to a topic that has gained significant attention in recent years due to its increasing relevance at the global scale: cooling of computer servers. In particular, Kadhim et al. explore the effects of the impact of flow distribution and pumping configuration on central processing unit temperatures in servers.
The sixth and the seventh papers report on the research output of international collaborations between the UK and China. The paper by Yun et al. investigates the phase transformation in the ice, water and brine system whereas the paper by Gong et al. focuses on the local heat transfer characteristic in helically coiled tubes.
Investigations on heat exchanger performance are presented in the papers by Huang et al. from the University of Maryland and Johnson Controls Inc., reporting on experimental work related to “Airside Heat Transfer and Friction Characteristics of a 0.8 mm Diameter Bare Tube Heat Exchanger” and the paper by Blackall et al. from the University of Manchester focuses on “Modelling of In-Line Tube Banks inside Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactor Boilers”.
The closing paper by Díaz-Bejarano et al. on “Evaluation of heat exchanger network retrofit design using plant data”, in collaboration between Repsol and Hexxcell Ltd., shows how state-of-the-art dynamic simulations can be used in conjunction with plant data to assess the performance of alternative retrofit solutions.
I believe this Special Issue provides the reader with a flavor for the excellent papers presented at the conference and I would like to take this opportunity to thank all members of the organizing committee, authors and delegates for their excellent work and participation, making the UK National Heat Transfer Conference Series a continued success.
Finally, as the Guest Editor and on behalf of the UK National Heat Transfer Committee I would like to thank Professor Afshin Ghajar, Editor-in-Chief of Heat Transfer Engineering, who has whole-heartedly supported this conference and the Special Issue. His tireless efforts in assuring high-quality publications are sincerely appreciated.
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Notes on contributors
Francesco Coletti
Francesco Coletti is the co-founder and CEO of Hexxcell Ltd, a high-tech company providing advanced analytics and predictive maintenance solutions for industrial heat transfer systems. Francesco is also a Senior Lecturer at Brunel University London, the Executive Editor of Heat Exchange Design Handbook, the Secretary of the UK National Heat Transfer Committee and one of the two elected representatives for the UK to the Assembly for International Heat Transfer Conferences. He holds a Laurea degree in Chemical Engineering from Padova University, Italy, an MSc in Process Systems Engineering and a PhD in Chemical Engineering from Imperial College London, UK.