Turbulent Flow and Heat Transfer in Bends of Circular Cross Section: I—Heat Transfer Experiments

Abstract

Experiments were performed to determine the local heat transfer characteristics of bends of circular cross section to which fluid was delivered either via a sharp-edged inlet or via a hydrodynamic development tube. The naphthalene sublimation technique, a mass transfer method, was used to facilitate the experiments. Bends subtending turning angles of 30, 60, and 90 deg were investigated, and the Reynolds number was varied between 5000 and 100,000. It was found that the local heat transfer coefficients at the outside of the bend were, for the most part, larger than those at the inside of the bend, but the deviations decreased as the Reynolds number increased. The streamwise distributions of the local transfer coefficient were markedly affected by the inlet condition; those for the sharp-edged inlet exhibited a universal shape, while the shapes of those for the tube-fed inlet depended both on the Reynolds number and on whether the distribution corresponded to the inside or the outside of the bend. In addition, the distributions for the case of the sharp-edged inlet exhibited higher local maxima and approached the fully developed regime more rapidly than did those for the tube-fed inlet. The heat transfer results were supplemented by flow visualization.