CFD Analysis for Thermal Behavior of Turbulent Channel Flow of Different Geometry of Bottom Plate

The present work is carried out to investigate heat transfer and friction factor characteristics of fluid (air) flow through turbulent channel i.e. parallel plate heat exchanger for different geometry and designs parameters, with a bottom plate applied to uniform constant heat flux thermal boundary condition, and upper plate is provided with a insulated condition. The fluid domain is designed using ANSYS Workbench v15 software and simulated using ANSYS Fluent v15 software, which is based on finite element method. Realizable k-ε turbulent model with wall function is applied for solving turbulence in the domain, and second-order upwind scheme was provided for calculation. The SIMPLE algorithm was adopted to handle the pressure-velocity coupling in the calculation. Parameters like Nusselt number, friction factor and heat transfer coefficient have been obtained for the designs and different contours of temperature, turbulent kinetic energy and velocity magnitude are also presented. The geometries used for bottom plate of heat exchanger are trapezoidal grooved, ribbed and rib-grooved plate, and the groove/rib length (B) to channel height (H) ratio are taken as 0.5, 0.75, 1.0, 1.25 and 1.5 for all three geometry and simulation is done for turbulent regime from 6000 to 18000 Reynolds number . The main objective is to find optimum B/H ratio under similar boundary condition. The optimum B/H ratio are found according to thermal analysis of trapezoidal grooved, ribbed and rib-grooved is 1.0, 1.25 and 1.5 respectively at Reynolds number is 6000. Keyword: Turbulent channel, ANSYS Fluent, 2-D Analysis, Different geometries, Friction Factor