Numerical study of heat transfer of laminar air flow in perforated trapezoidal corrugated plate-fin ducts

Abstract

A novel trapezoidal corrugated perforated fin core is proposed in this study. The porosity of the fin surface, or perforations, is indicated to promote the unusual behavior of increasing the heat transfer coefficient, while reducing the friction factor with respect to its non-perforated counterpart, primarily due to surface transpiration, which leads to better flow mixing and successive boundary layer disturbances. This allows the heat exchanger to be built much more compact with a smaller volume and a front area. To highlight this, the results of the computational simulations for velocity and temperature fields in typical trapezoidal corrugated perforated plate-fin ducts are presented. Constant property, fully or periodically developed laminar airflow [Formula: see text] with Reynolds number [Formula: see text] passing through inter-fin passages, with fins at constant wall temperature T, in which the fin walls have perforations equally spaced along the length of the duct, is considered and a parametric study of the effects of the duct geometry, including the variation of the inclination angle [Formula: see text] of the diverging plane, the aspect ratio of the channel or period length and fin density effects [Formula: see text] and the converging-diverging ratio of the plate [Formula: see text], is performed. The results of the Fanning friction factor and the Nusselt number over the wide range of the Reynolds number, which was treated in this study, show the improved performance. The improvement is assessed quantitatively by the area goodness factor ( j/ f) relative to Re, comparison with simple flat channels. It is seen that increasing ϕ to [Formula: see text] improves the core performance; As ϕ increases beyond [Formula: see text], performance starts to decrease. j/ f increases with increasing λ; and λ = 3.6 acts as an inflection point. It is better to have a large λ value for lower Re range and vice versa. As ε increases, the performance increases; so, the highest area goodness factor value occurs at [Formula: see text]. In case 11, with [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], and [Formula: see text] at Re = 200, compared to the non-perforated channel, the friction factor decreases about 11%, and the area goodness factor increases about 72%. Thus, the area goodness factor of the perforated case reaches 0.37.