Influence of the Switch-Over Period of an Alternately Active Bi-Heater on Heat Transfer Enhancement Inside a Cavity

Abstract

Increasing power demands on multicore processors necessitate effective thermal management. The present study investigates natural convection heat transfer inside a square cavity with an alternately active bi-heater that mimics two cores of a dual-core processor. Pulsating heat flux condition is implemented on two discrete heaters with a certain switching frequency. The heat transfer characteristics have been investigated for Prandtl number of 0.71 and Rayleigh number in the range of 10³–10⁶ using OpenFOAM. The results obtained for alternative active heaters configuration have been compared with that of the steady single heater and steady double-symmetric heaters subjected to the same heat flux. The alternately active heater configuration showed better heat transfer characteristics than a single steady heater for all switchover periods, and better than a double-symmetric heater for low switchover periods. However, it is found that for higher values of the switchover period, the maximum temperature of alternately active heaters configuration touches the temperature of a steady single heater. This threshold switchover period has been determined using a scale analysis. The threshold switchover periods determined from scale analysis are consistent with the results obtained from numerical simulations for different Rayleigh numbers and heater lengths.

Acknowledgement

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support from the High Performance Computing Cluster at Jadavpur University for carrying out this computational study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anish Pal

Anish Pal is currently a Ph.D. student at University of Illinois at Chicago. He received his Master’s degree and Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India in 2022 and 2019, respectively. His research interests include fundamentals and applications of fluid mechanics and heat transfer.

Riddhideep Biswas

Riddhideep biswas received his Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India in 2021. His areas of research involve computational fluid mechanics and heat transfer.

Sourav Sarkar

Sourav Sarkar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. He received his Master’s degree and Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Madras and Jadavpur University, respectively. He received his Ph.D. in Engineering from Jadavpur University in 2022. His research interests include Heat transfer, combustion, multiphase flow, refrigeration and air conditioning.

Aranyak Chakravarty

Aranyak Chakravarty is an Assistant Professor in the School of Nuclear Studies & Applications at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. He also serves as an adjunct faculty in the Department of Applied Mechanics, IIT Madras. He completed his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Jadavpur University in 2019. Subsequently, he worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India, in collaboration with Northwestern University, USA, before joining Jadavpur University in 2020. His primary research interests include multiphase flows, heat transfer, thermal-hydraulics of nuclear reactor systems and pulmonary fluid dynamics. He has published 20 research articles in various leading journals and over 30 articles in globally reputed conferences. He also has 3 published book chapters to his credit.

Achintya Mukhopadhyay

Achintya Mukhopadhyay is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. He also served as Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He also held visiting positions at Technical University of Munich where he was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow and University of Illinois at Chicago. His teaching and research interests include thermodynamics, heat transfer, combustion, multiphase flows and thermal management of energy systems. He has over 300 research publications including over 100 international journal publications. He is a Fellow of the West Bengal Academy of Science and Technology and International Society for Energy, Environment and Sustainability, recipient of INSA Teachers Award from Indian National Science Academy and life member of Indian Society of Heat and Mass Transfer and Indian section of the Combustion Institute.