Numerical investigation of natural convection heat transfer in a cylindrical enclosure due to ultrasonic vibrations.

Application of ultrasonic waves for heat transfer augmentation has been proposed in the last few decades. Due to limited researches on acoustic streaming induced by ultrasonic oscillation, the effect of ultrasonic waves on natural convection heat transfer is the main purpose of this paper. At first, natural convection on up-ward-facing heating surface in a cylindrical enclosure filled with air is investigated numerically by the finite difference method, then the effect of upper surface oscillation on convection heat transfer is considered. The conservation equations in Lagrangian approach and compressible fluid are assumed for the numerical simulation. Results show that acoustic pressure will become steady after some milliseconds also pressure oscillation amplitude and acoustic velocity components will be constant therefore steady state velocity is used for solving energy equation. Results show that Enhancement of heat transfer coefficient can be up to 175% by induced ultrasonic waves. In addition, the effect of different parameters on acoustic streaming and heat transfer has been studied.

Numerical simulation of gas flow and heat transfer in a rough microchannel using the lattice Boltzmann method.

In microfluidics, two important factors responsible for the differences between the characteristics of the flow and heat transfer in microchannels and conventional channels are rarefaction and surface roughness which are studied in the present work. An incompressible gas flow in a microchannel is simulated two dimensionally using the lattice Boltzmann method. The flow is in the slip regime and surface roughness is modeled by both regular and Gaussian random distribution of rectangular modules. The effects of relative surface roughness height and Knudsen number on gaseous flow and heat transfer are studied. It was shown that as the relative roughness height increases, the Poiseuille number increases and the Nusselt number has a decreasing or increasing trend, depending on the degree of rarefaction. A comparison between the flow and heat transfer characteristics in regular and random distribution of surface roughness demonstrates that in regular roughness, circular flows are more pronounced; Poiseuille number is higher and Nusselt number is lower than that of its equivalent random roughness.