Viscous dissipation effect on the flow of a thermodependent Herschel-Bulkley fluid

Abstract

The present study concerns the numerical analysis of both hydrodynamic and thermal properties of a Herschel-Bulkley fluid flow in a pipe. The flow, which involves forced heat transfer convection, is steady and takes place within a pipe of circular cross section with uniform wall temperature. The Herschel-Bulkley model with the Papanastasiou regularization is used and flow index values of 1 and 1.5 are considered. The study focuses on the effect of neglecting both viscous dissipation and temperature dependence of the fluid consistency on its hydrodynamic and thermal properties. For that purpose, we investigate both wall heating (Br<0) and wall cooling (Br>0) as well as the exponential temperature dependence of the consistency. The results show that neglecting both of these parameters results in more than a 50% underestimation of the heat transfer due to the viscous nature of this kind of fluid.