HEAT TRANSFER IN A ROTATING RIB-ROUGHENED WEDGE-SHAPED U-DUCT

Heat transfer in a rotating two-pass trapezium-shaped channel, with staggered 90-deg ribs on both leading and trailing surfaces is experimentally investigated. The hydraulic diameter of the first and second pass is 24.5 mm and 16.9 mm, respectively. The inlet Reynolds number and rotational speed range from 10000 to 50000 and zero to 1000 rpm, respectively, which results in the inlet rotation number varying from zero to 1.0. The heated copper plate technique is employed to measure the regional averaged heater transfer coefficients. Pressure drops are measured by newly designed rotating pressure measurements module. Both ribbed cases and smooth cases are compared to present rib enhancement effect. For non-rotating result, the results show that the trailing surface presents much higher heat transfer than other cases due to the special wedge-shaped geometry. The ribbed wedge-shaped achieves enhanced regional heat transfer performances than the smooth case at all locations. Compared with the non rotating results in the first pass, heat transfer on both trailing and leading surfaces is enhanced except for the position near the turn region, but weakened on outer surface in stream-wise direction. And at high rotation numbers, the highest maximum heat transfer on railing surface happens at a location of approximately X/D=10. In the first pass, rotation always enhances heat transfer on the trailing surface as rotation number increases and the rotation-to-stationary Nusselt number ratio reaches to 2.0 at the rotation number of 0.5. The leading and outer surfaces both have a critical rotation number located at Ro(c)=0.05.