Numerical Simulation of Heat Transfer in Turbulent Pipe Flow with Structured Wall Surfaces

Abstract

Innovative heat transfer technology is the key to the optimization of many processes in the power or process industry. Operational costs and usage of valuable resources can be reduced, if the heat transfer efficiency is increased and pressure loss is reduced. Therefore, the current work is focused on heat transfer enhancement at tubes with micro-structured walls with turbulent flow. In this kind of geometry modern optical measurement technology cannot be applied and the analysis of the turbulent transport is only possible with numerical flow simulations. A large-eddy turbulence model is applied to account for turbulence closures. First, the simulation setup is validated with data from the literature and then several micro-structured geometries are investigated. The simulations are computationally costly and depend on high performance computing (HPC). The open-source software library OpenFOAM® is applied to perform massively parallel simulations.