An Experimental and Numerical Study of Flow and Heat Transfer in Channels With Pin Fin-Dimple Combined Arrays of Different Configurations

Abstract

An experimental and numerical study was conducted to investigate the flow and heat transfer characteristics in channels with pin fin-dimple combined arrays of different configurations, where dimples are located transversely or both transversely and streamwisely between the pin fins. The flow structure, friction factor, and heat transfer characteristics of the pin fin-dimple channels of different configurations have been obtained and compared with each other for the Reynolds number range of 8200–50,500. The experimental study showed that, compared to the pin fin channel, depending on the configurations of the pin fin-dimple combined arrays the pin fin-dimple channel can have distinctively further improved convective heat transfer performance by 8.0%–20.0%, whereas lower or slightly higher friction factors over the studied Reynolds number range. Furthermore, three-dimensional and steady-state conjugate computations have been carried out for similar experimental conditions. The numerical computations showed detailed characteristics of the distribution of the velocity and turbulence level in the flow, which revealed the underlying mechanisms for the pressure loss and heat transfer characteristics in the pin fin-dimple channels of different configurations.