Laminar Forced Convection in Transversely Corrugated Microtubes

Abstract

Forced convection heat transfer in fully developed laminar flow in transversely corrugated tubes is investigated for nonuniform but constant wall heat flux as well as for constant wall temperature. Epitrochoid conformal mapping is used to map the flow domain onto the unit circle in the computational domain. The governing equations are solved in the computational domain analytically. An exact analytical solution for the temperature field is derived together with closed form expressions for bulk temperature and Nusselt number for the case of the constant heat flux at the wall. A variable coefficient Helmholtz eigenvalue problem governs the case of the constant wall temperature. A novel semi-analytical solution based on the spectral Galerkin method is introduced to solve the Helmholtz equation. The solution in both constant wall heat flux and constant wall temperature case is shown to collapse onto the well-known results for the circular straight tube for zero waviness.