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Heat transfer increase by convection in liquid-infused surfaces for laminar and turbulent flows

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 April 2022

Johan Sundin*
Affiliation:
FLOW Centre, Department of Engineering Mechanics, KTH, Stockholm SE-100 44, Sweden
Umberto Ciri
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, Mayagüez, PR 00680, USA
Stefano Leonardi
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX 75080, USA
Marcus Hultmark
Affiliation:
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA
Shervin Bagheri
Affiliation:
FLOW Centre, Department of Engineering Mechanics, KTH, Stockholm SE-100 44, Sweden
*
Email address for correspondence: johasu@mech.kth.se

Abstract

Liquid-infused surfaces can reduce friction drag in both laminar and turbulent flows. However, the heat transfer properties of such multi-phase surfaces have still not been investigated to a large extent. We use numerical simulations to study conjugate heat transfer of liquid-filled grooves. It is shown that heat transfer can increase for both laminar and turbulent liquid flows due to recirculation in the surface texture. Laminar flow simulations show that for the increase to be substantial, the thermal conductivity of the solid must be similar to the thermal conductivity of the fluids, and the recirculation in the grooves must be sufficiently strong (Péclet number larger than 1). The ratio of the surface cavity to the system height is an upper limit of the direct contribution from the recirculation. While this ratio can be significant for laminar flows in microchannels, it is limited for turbulent flows, where the system scale (e.g. channel height) usually is much larger than the texture height. However, heat transfer enhancement of the order of $10\,\%$ is observed (with a net drag reduction) in a turbulent channel flow at a friction Reynolds number ${{Re}}_\tau \approx 180$. It is shown that the turbulent convection in the bulk can be enhanced indirectly from the recirculation in the grooves.

Information

Type
JFM Papers
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press.
Figure 0

Figure 1. (a) Current practice to increase heat transfer through wall modification and (b) suggested method by using LIS. The working (external) fluid and the infusing liquid are shown in blue and green, respectively. The solid is depicted in brown.

Figure 1

Table 1. Overview of thermal conductivity, $\kappa$, viscosity, $\mu$, density, $\rho$, and isobaric specific heat capacity, $c_p$, for some fluids and solids. (R, Rohsenow et al. (1998); M, Mark (2009); L, Liu, Sheng & He (2019); C, Cardarelli (2018); VB, Van Buren & Smits (2017); K1, Kashiwagi et al. (1982); K2, Khasanshin, Shchamialiou & Poddubskij (2003)).

Figure 2

Figure 2. (a) Heat transport mechanisms contributing to the heat flux. (b) Schematic illustration of an interface unit cell for LIS. The colours of the fluids and the solid are the same as in figure 1.

Figure 3

Figure 3. (a) The change in $q/q^{0}$ because of varying $\kappa _s$ for three different viscosity ratios and ${{Pr}}_\infty = 1$, $10$ and $100$ at ${{Re}}_\infty = 100$. Each marker represents a simulation result, and the lines connect markers corresponding to the same $\mu _i/\mu _\infty$ and ${{Pr}}_\infty$. The ratio $q/q^{0}$ increases with increasing ${{Pr}}_\infty$ for a fixed $\kappa _s/\kappa _i$ and $\mu _i/\mu _\infty$, indicated by the arrow. The curves for ${{Pr}}_\infty = 1$ are almost on top of each other. The dashed line shows $q/q^{0} = 1$. (b) The different contributions to $q$ for $\kappa _s/\kappa _i = 0.5$, $1$, and $2$ at ${{Re}}_\infty = 100$, $\mu _i/\mu _\infty = 1$ and ${{Pr}}_\infty = 10$.

Figure 4

Figure 4. Filled contour plots of the temperature at ${{Re}}_\infty = 100$, $\mu _i/\mu _\infty = 1$ and ${{Pr}}_\infty = 10$, for (a) $\kappa _s/\kappa _i = 0.5$, (b) $\kappa _s/\kappa _i = 1$ and (c) $\kappa _s/\kappa _i = 2$. The colour bar gives the corresponding temperatures, ranging from $T_u$ ($0$) to $T_l$ ($1$). Streamlines (white dashed lines) indicate the velocity field, computed as contour lines of the streamfunction (constant increment in the groove; showing a few in the external flow). The edges of the solid are marked with solid lines. In and around the groove, there is a distortion of the temperature field due to convection. The convection increases heat transfer in all three cases. However, in (a), the higher thermal conductivity in the infusing liquid also increases $q/q^{0}$. In (c), the solid has a higher thermal conductivity, reducing the benefit of the groove. The heat fluxes in and out of the groove are illustrated with arrows in (b). The attached numbers are the heat fluxes normalised by $q$.

Figure 5

Figure 5. The relative contribution to the heat flux from convection as a function of (a) ${{Re}}_\infty$, (b) ${{Pe}}_\infty$ and (c) ${{Pe}}_i$. In (a), results for $\mu _i/\mu _\infty = 1$ are shown; (b,c) contain results for $\mu _i/\mu _\infty = 0.1$, $1$ and $10$ (colours and symbols as in figure 3a). Prandtl numbers are ${{Pr}}_\infty = 0.1$, $1$, $10$ and $100$. The ratio $q_{{conv},d}/q$ increases with ${{Pr}}_\infty$ for a specific ${{Re}}_\infty$ (lines connect markers of identical $\mu _i/\mu _\infty$ and ${{Pr}}_\infty$). For a certain viscosity ratio, the curves collapse if expressed as a function of ${{Pe}}_\infty$. However, if defined as a function of ${{Pe}}_i$, they all collapse. The black dash-dotted line in (c) is (4.3).

Figure 6

Figure 6. (a) The Reynolds number of the flow in the grooves, ${{Re}}_i$, expressed as a function of the external flow Reynolds number, ${{Re}}_\infty$, for $p/k = 2$ and three different viscosity ratios ($\mu _i/\mu _\infty = 0.1$, $1$ and $10$, with colours and symbols as in figure 3a). The relation is approximately linear for low Reynolds numbers. The linearity is made visible by the lines ${{Re}}_i = {{Re}}_\infty b/(h + b) \boldsymbol {\cdot } k\mu _\infty /(h\mu _i)$, with $b$ predicted for Stokes flow (black). (b) The derived Stokes limit slip lengths over the pitch, $b/p$, for $p/k = 2$, $4$ and 8, and groove width $w = p - k$.

Figure 7

Figure 7. The relative contribution to the heat flux from convection for (ac) $p/k = 4$ and (df) $p/k = 8$. The colours and symbols represent viscosity ratios as in figure 3(a), and the same ${{Pr}}_\infty$ as in figure 5 were used. Equation (4.3) is also shown (dashed-dotted line). The solver did not converge for some of the higher ${{Re}}_i$, so these points have been removed.

Figure 8

Figure 8. Sketch of the flow domain used in the turbulent simulations. The mean flow is in the positive $x$-direction. The upper wall is smooth. Transverse grooves have been added on the lower wall, on top of a slab of the same height, $k$. They correspond to a solid fraction $\phi _s = 1/4$. The colours of the infusing liquid and the solid are the same as in figure 1. The external fluid is not shown.

Figure 9

Table 2. Summary of results from the turbulent simulations. The friction Reynolds number of the smooth channel flow was ${{Re}}_\tau ^{0} = 178.7$, and for the flow with LIS, ${{Re}}_\tau = 176.1$, based on the friction velocity of the textured surface. The drag reduction (${{DR}}$) was computed by (5.7) and the quantities $\tau ^{0}$, $q^{0}$, and $Nu^{0}$ are wall-shear stress, heat flux and Nusselt number of the smooth-wall simulations, respectively. The heat transfer increase has an uncertainty of ${\pm }2\,\%$ (Appendix F).

Figure 10

Figure 9. Contributions to $q/q^{0}$ for the different turbulent flow cases. On this scale, $q_{{conv},d}$ is hardly visible, corresponding to approximately $1\,\%$ or less of $q$ (table 2).

Figure 11

Figure 10. (a) Comparison of convective heat flux for LIS in laminar flow (— — —, black) and turbulent flow (— — —, ${{\left \langle \tilde { {v} }\tilde { {T} }\right \rangle }}^{+}$; ——, $\left \langle v'T'\right \rangle ^{+}$; ${\cdots }\,{\cdots }$, smooth-wall reference; blue, red and yellow for ${{Pr}}_\infty = 1$, $2$ and $4$, respectively). For laminar and turbulent flows, ${{\left \langle \tilde { {v} }\tilde { {T} }\right \rangle }}^{+} \approx 0$ in the bulk flow ($y > 0$), and for the turbulent flow, $\left \langle v'T'\right \rangle ^{+} \approx 0$ inside the grooves ($y < 0$). (b) Comparison of $q_{{conv},d}/q$ from the turbulent simulations (colours as in $a$) and (4.3) (dash-dotted line).

Figure 12

Figure 11. Comparison of (5.6), assuming $\epsilon = 0$ (solid lines) and $\epsilon = 2.3\times 10^{-3}$ (dotted lines, corresponding to ${{Pr}}_\infty = 2$), with simulation results shown with circles for the three values of ${{Pr}}_\infty$. The colours are the same as in figure 10(a).

Figure 13

Figure 12. (a) The root-mean-squared wall-normal velocity for turbulent flow over LIS (——, $v_{rms}^{+}$; — — —, dispersive component $v_{{rms},d}^{+}$; $\text {---} \cdot \text {---}$, random component $v_{{rms},r}^{+}$; ${\cdots }\,{\cdots }$, smooth-wall reference). (b) The drag reduction of the current LIS as a function of the slip length in nominal wall units (circle), compared with the ideal relation by Rastegari & Akhavan (2015) (solid line).

Figure 14

Figure 13. Grid convergence study for laminar flow with FreeFem++, with $\kappa _i = \kappa _\infty = \kappa _s$, $p/k = 4$, $\mu _i/\mu _\infty = 0.4$, ${{Re}}_i = 24$ and ${{Pr}}_\infty = 1$ and $100$. Three grids were used, with $N_y = 200$, $400$ and $800$ cells in the wall-normal direction. The horizontal scale is normalised with groove height, $k$, and corresponds to the complete domain, with the interface at $y = 0$. In (b), $u_{rms}^{+}$ and $v_{rms}^{+}$ denote the streamwise and wall-normal root-mean-squared velocities, respectively.

Figure 15

Figure 14. Statistics from the turbulent flow simulations (——-, LIS; ${\cdots }\,{\cdots }$, smooth-wall reference; blue, red and yellow for ${{Pr}}_\infty = 1$, $2$ and $4$, respectively). Wall units are based on the friction velocity of the lower wall. In (c), $w_{rms}^{+}$ denotes the spanwise root-mean-squared velocity.