Experimental Analysis of Gas Micro-Convection Through Commercial Microtubes

Abstract

In this article, an experimental campaign devoted to analyzing the forced micro-convection features of heated gas flows through commercial stainless-steel microtubes having inner diameters of 172 μm and 750 μm is described. The experimental results obtained by heating the microtubes with an imposed uniform heat flux (H-boundary condition) at the external wall, in terms of Nusselt numbers, are compared to the predictions of the classical correlations validated for conventional pipes and to the correlations proposed for gas flows through microtubes under laminar and transitional conditions (100 < Re < 4,000). The cross-sections of the tested microtubes enabled the analysis of the effects of wall axial heat conduction on the Nusselt number. It was observed that the Nusselt number is strongly dependent on the Reynolds number in the laminar regime, and this fact is explained in the article with the effects of wall axial heat conduction and the difficulties in the experimental determination of the right exit bulk temperature of the gas flow, which cannot be ignored in the thermal analysis. The agreement between the Gnielinski correlation and the experimental Nusselt number is poor, especially for low Reynolds numbers, if one uses the average gas bulk temperature, obtained as the arithmetic mean between the inlet and outlet gas bulk temperature, in the definition of the experimental Nusselt number. On the contrary, the agreement with the Gnielinski correlation improves if the local wall-gas temperature difference near the exit of the microtube is used instead. The experimental results presented in the article demonstrate that the criteria for the design of accurate micro-convection tests can be quite different from those for the analysis of forced convection through conventional pipes.

Keywords:

• forced convection in micro electro mechanical systems (MEMS)
• gas microflows
• scaling effects
• Nusselt number
• conjugate wall-gas heat transfer

Notes

This paper was originally presented at the Second European Conference on Microfluidics held in Toulouse, France, December 2010.