NUMERICAL INVESTIGATION OF TURBULENT FORCED CONVECTION IN A RECTANGULAR CHANNEL WITH TRANSVERSE RIBS

Abstract

A numerical investigation of turbulent forced convection and heat transfer characteristics in a twodimensional rectangular channel with transverse ribs is carried out in the present work. The bottom wall formed by heated ribs of rectangular section is subject to a uniform heat flux condition, whereas the upper wall is thermally insulated. The effect of turbulence models is studied by utilizing three models: the standard k-ε, the Renormalized Group (RNG) k– ε , and shear stress transport (SST) k-ɷ. The numerical approach is based on the finite volume method and the SIMPLE algorithm has been adopted for the discretization of the pressure–velocity terms. The Fluent CFD code is used in this work. The fluid flow and heat transfer characteristics are presented for Reynolds number fixed at 9.4×104. The effects of geometry parameters, as well as characteristics of the turbulent forced convection flow through the ribs and in to the rectangular channel, are analyzed in detail. The predicted results from using three turbulence models reveal that the standard k−ε turbulence model generally provides better agreement as compared to the others