Pressure Drop and Heat Transfer of Fully Developed, Laminar Flow in Rough, Rectangular Microchannels

Abstract

In this paper, a Gaussian, isotropic distribution has been applied to model the wall roughness in microchannels of rectangular cross-section in order to investigate the friction factor and convection coefficient of fully developed, laminar and incompressible flows. As the hydraulic diameter of (micro-) channels decreases, the surface to volume ratio increases rapidly. As a result, the surface phenomena and the effect of roughness become more significant. There is a need for a better understanding of the effect of wall roughness on fluid flow characteristics in microchannels which make them well suited for a wide variety of unique cooling applications. The results of this research indicate that the friction factor and convection heat transfer coefficient increase by increasing the relative roughness of channel. The effect of changing the aspect ratio has also been investigated in this research. In addition, results are compared with experimental data obtained by different researchers.