A Novel Transient Liquid Crystal Technique to Determine Heat Transfer Coefficient Distributions and Adiabatic Wall Temperature in a Three-Temperature Problem

Abstract

Transient liquid crystal techniques are widely used for experimental heat transfer measurements. In many instances it is necessary to model the heat transfer resulting from the temperature difference between a mixture of two gas streams and a solid surface. To nondimensionally characterize the heat transfer from scale models it is necessary to know both the heat transfer coefficient and adiabatic wall temperature of the model. Traditional techniques rely on deducing both parameters from a single test. This is a poorly conditioned problem. A novel strategy is proposed in which both parameters are deduced from a well-conditioned three-test strategy. The heat transfer coefficient is first calculated in a single test; the contribution from each driving gas stream is then deduced using additional tests. Analytical techniques are developed to deal with variations in the temperature profile and transient start time of each flow. The technique is applied to the analysis of the heat transfer within a low aspect ratio impingement channel with initial cross flow.