Local Friction and Heat Transfer Behavior of Water in a Turbulent Pipe Flow With a Large Heat Flux at the Wall

Abstract

The present study investigated the behavior of friction and heat transfer coefficients of water flowing turbulently in a relatively long (i.e., 950 diameter long) circular pipe. When a large heat flux was applied at the wall, the viscosity of water significantly decreased along the axial direction due to the increasing temperature of water. A concept of a “redeveloping region” was introduced, where the local heat transfer coefficient increased while the local friction coefficient decreased due to the above-mentioned viscosity change. The present study proposed the use of local bulk-mean temperature to determine local Nusselt numbers by using local Reynolds (ReLB) and Prandtl numbers (PrLB), a method that automatically took into account the effect of axial viscosity change on the evaluation of local heat transfer coefficients. A new turbulent heat transfer correlation for the prediction of the local Nusselt number is given as Nux=0.00425ReLB0.979PrLB0.4(μw/μb)−0.11.