Numerical Investigation of Forced Convective Heat Transfer Characteristics of a Porous Channel Filled With -Water Nanofluid in the Presence of Heaters and Coolers

ABSTRACT

In this analysis, forced convective heat transfer characteristics of -water nanofluid through a porous channel with several combinations of heaters and coolers is investigated numerically. The two-dimensional equations governing nanofluid flow and heat transfer through porous media are discretized using in-house code with Streamline Upwind Petrov Galerkin-based Finite Element Method. Darcy–Brinkman–Forchheimer’s generalized porous media model is used in this study. The average Nusselt number of basefluid without porous media, nanofluid with and without porous media cases are compared for different Peclet numbers and the effect of Peclet number on stream lines and isotherms are studied for nanofluid with and without porous media cases. In addition to this the effect of Darcy number, porosity, and nanoparticle volume fraction on the performance of average Nusselt number is investigated. From these results, it is observed that the average Nusselt number increases with decrease in Darcy number. From this analysis, it can be concluded that addition of porous media results in enhancement of heat transfer and can be used as a potential technique for electronic cooling applications.

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Notes on contributors

Siva Sai Vadri

Siva Sai Vadri pursued M.S. by research under the supervision of Dr. Arul Prakash (Department of Applied Mechanics) and Dr. Arvind Pattamatta (Department of Mechanical Engineering) from Indian Institute of Technology Madras and received his M.S. degree in Applied Mechanics in the year 2015. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in National University of Singapore.

Arul Prakash Karaiyan

Arul Prakash Karaiyan is an Associate Professor at Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He received his Ph.D. degree from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. In his post-doctoral work at LEGI (Laboratory for industrial and Geophysical flows) France, he worked on thermal exchanges in high Reynolds number turbulent flows using Large Eddy Simulation (LES), which has a specific application to the cooling of rocket engines. His research interests include computational fluid dynamics and heat transfer, cooling technologies, thermal hydraulics, LES, and related techniques.

Arvind Pattamatta

Arvind Pattamatta is an Associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Madras since 2010. He received his Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from SUNY, Buffalo, NY in 2009, masters in Aerospace Engineering from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (2003), and B.E. in Aeronautical Engineering from University of Madras. He is the recipient of Alexander von Humboldt fellowship for the year 2013 to conduct research studies at TU Darmstadt, Germany. His research interests are in the areas of computational nanoscale energy transport, computational fluid dynamics, turbulence modeling, numerical analysis, and high performance computing.