Performance Evaluation of Liquid Flow With PCM Particles in Microchannels
- 7 March 2005
- journal article
- Published by ASME International in Journal of Heat Transfer
- Vol. 127 (8), 931-940
- https://doi.org/10.1115/1.1929783
Abstract
A two-phase, non thermal equilibrium-based model is applied to the numerical simulation of laminar flow and heat transfer characteristics of suspension with microsize phase-change material (PCM) particles in a microchannel. The model solves the conservation of mass, momentum, and thermal energy equations for liquid and particle phases separately. The study focuses on the parametric study of optimal conditions where heat transfer is enhanced with an increase in fluid power necessary for pumping the two-phase flow. The main contribution of PCM particles to the enhancement of heat transfer in a microsize tube is to increase the effective thermal capacity and utilize the latent heat effect under the laminar flow condition. An effectiveness factor εeff is defined to evaluate the heat transfer enhancement compared to the single-phase flow heat transfer and is calculated under different wall heat fluxes and different Reynolds numbers. The comparison is also made to evaluate the performance index, i.e., the ratio of total heat transfer rate to fluid flow power (pressure drop multiplied by volume flow rate) between PCM suspension flow and pure water single-phase flow. The results show that for a given Reynolds number, there exists an optimal heat flux under which the εeff value is the greatest. In general, the PCM suspension flow with phase change has a significantly higher performance index than the pure-fluid flow. The comparison of the model simulation with the limited experimental results for a MCPCM suspension flow in a 3mmdia tube reveals the sensitivity of wall temperature distribution to the PCM supply temperature and the importance of characterizing the phase change region for a given tube length.Keywords
This publication has 15 references indexed in Scilit:
- A NUMERICAL MODEL FOR PHASE-CHANGE SUSPENSION FLOW IN MICROCHANNELSNumerical Heat Transfer, Part A: Applications, 2004
- Design Analysis of a 3-D, Ultra-High Performance, Scalable, Micro Convective Heat Sink With NPCMPublished by ASME International ,2003
- Advanced micro air-cooling systems for high density packagingPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2002
- Ultimate theoretical models of nanocomputersNanotechnology, 1998
- Laminar forced convection heat transfer in microcapsulated phase change material suspensionsInternational Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, 1994
- Enhancement of forced convection heat transfer in viscous fluid flowsInternational Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, 1994
- Forced convection heat transfer in microencapsulated phase change material slurries: flow in circular ductsInternational Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, 1991
- Porosity distributions in a fluidized bed with an immersed obstacleAIChE Journal, 1989
- Hydrodynamics of Fiuidizatlon and Heat Transfer: Supercomputer ModelingApplied Mechanics Reviews, 1986
- Augmentation of heat transport in laminar flow of polystyrene suspensions. I. Experiments and resultsJournal of Applied Physics, 1975