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Thermal flow sensors with a wide dynamic range are at present not available in spite of the large demand which exists for such sensors in practical fluid flow measurements. In this paper, it is shown that the velocity range of a “time‐of‐flight” thermal flowmeter for slowly changing flows can be increased by using wires (or other heating/sensing elements) with large thermal inertia (time constant) and heating the sending wire with a continuous sinusoidal current, instead of discrete, very short, square‐wave pulses as in the usual pulsed‐wire anemometer. The device described here uses two parallel wires of 12.5μm diameter and its usable speed range is 0.05 to 25m/s. Although the present thermal flowmeter can be applied as a point measurement device, the main applications are in pipe flow, especially at very low flow rates. The high sensitivity at low flow rates makes the device especially suitable for this purpose.

The paper presents a numerical technique for the simulation of the effects of grey‐diffusive surface radiation on fluid flow using a finite volume procedure for two‐dimensional (plane and axi‐symmetric) geometries. The governing equations are solved sequentially, and the non‐linearities and coupling of variables are accounted for through outer iterations (coefficients updates). In order to reduce the number of outer iterations, a multigrid algorithm was implemented. The radiating surface model assumes a non‐participating medium, semi‐transparent walls and constant elementary surface temperature and radiation fluxes. The calculation of view factors is based on the analytical evaluation for the plane geometry and numerical integration for axi‐symmetric geometry. Ashadowing algorithm was implemented for the calculation of view factors in general geometries. The method for the calculation of view factors was first tested by comparison with available analytical solutions for a complex geometric configuration. The flow prediction code combined with radiation heat transfer was verified by comparisons with analytical one‐dimensional solutions. Further test calculations were done for the flow and heat transfer in a cavity with a radiating submerged body. As an example of the capabilities of the method, transport processes in metalorganic chemical vapour deposition (MOCVD) reactors were simulated.

Notes that, in a full‐scale application of the Monte Carlo method for combined heat transfer analysis, problems usually arise from the large computing requirements. Here the method to overcome this difficulty is the parallel execution of the Monte Carlo method in a distributed computing environment. Addresses the problem of determination of the temperature field formed under the assumption of radiative equilibrium in an enclosure idealizing an industrial furnace. The medium contained in this enclosure absorbs, emits and scatters anisotropically thermal radiation. Discusses two topics in detail: first, the efficiency of the parallelization of the developed code, and second, the influence of the scattering behavior of the medium. The adopted parallelization method for the first topic is the decomposition of the statistical sample and its subsequent distribution among the available processors. The measured high efficiencies showed that this method is particularly suited to the target architecture of this study, which is a dedicated network of workstations supporting the message passing paradigm. For the second topic, the results showed that taking into account the isotropic scattering, as opposed to neglecting the scattering, has a pronounced impact on the temperature distribution inside the enclosure. In contrast, the consideration of the sharply forward scattering, that is characteristic of all the real combustion particles, leaves the predicted temperature field almost undistinguishable from the absorbing/emitting case.

A mathematical model to predict the concentration polarisation in nanofiltration/reverse osmosis is described. It incorporates physical modelling for mass transfer, laminar hydrodynamics and the membrane rejection coefficient. The SIMPLE algorithm solves the discretised equations derived from the governing differential equations. The convection and diffusive terms of those equations are discretised by the upwind, the hybrid and the exponential schemes for comparison purposes. The hybrid scheme appears as the most suitable one for the type of flows studied herein. The model is first applied to predict the concentration polarisation in a slit, for which mathematical solutions for velocities and concentrations exist. Different grids are used within the hybrid scheme to evaluate the model sensitivity to the grid refinement. The 55×25 grid results agree excellently for engineering purposes with the known solutions. The model, incorporating a variation law for the membrane intrinsic rejection coefficient, was also applied to the predictions of a laboratory slit where experiments are performed and reported, yielding excellent results when compared with the experiments.

Isotropic artificial dissipation is added to the Navier‐Stokes equations along with a correction term which cancels the artificial dissipation term in the limit when the mesh size is zero. For a finite mesh size, the correction term replaces the artificial viscosity terms with hyperviscosity terms, i.e., with an artificial dissipation which depends on the fourth derivatives of the velocity. Hyperviscosity more effectively suppresses the higher wave number modes and has a smaller effect on the inertial modes of the flow field than does artificial viscosity. This scheme is implemented using the finite element method and therefore the required amount of dissipation is determined by analysing the discretization on a finite element. The scheme is used to simulate the flow in a driven cavity and over a backward facing step and the results are compared to existing results for these cases.

Numerical simulation of a fluid flow involves the specification of boundary conditions along all or part of the boundary. Designs a means of handling outflow boundary conditions for the incompressible Navier‐Stokes equations. Addresses through‐flow problems involving the specification of outflow conditions at the synthetic boundary. This outflow boundary condition is applicable to a developing flow problem. The underlying objectives behind designing the boundary condition at the truncated boundary are three‐fold, namely: matching with Navier‐Stokes equations inside the domain; taking both non‐linear and diffusive contributions into account; and ensuring the discrete divergence‐free condition. In order to meet these requirements, follows the concept of a free boundary condition by taking the outflow nodal values of u, v and p as unknowns, which are coupled with the interior unknowns through the surface integrals in the momentum equations. The computed solutions can be legitimately regarded as solutions to conservation equations under consideration when both components of the surface traction vector approach zero. With the convergent property accommodated in the present mixed finite element analysis, the task remains to simply improve the accuracy. Demonstrates the capability of the proposed non‐linear outflow boundary conditions through several benchmark tests.

Three‐dimensional flows over backward facing s.tif are analysed by means of a finite element procedure, which shares many features with the SIMPLER method. In fact, given an initial or guessed velocity field, the pseudovelocities, i.e. the velocities that would prevail in the absence of the pressure field, are found first. Then, by enforcing continuity on the pseudovelocity field, the tentative pressure is estimated, and the momentum equations are solved in sequence for velocity components. Afterwards, continuity is enforced again to find corrections that are used to modify the velocity field and the estimated pressure field. Finally, whenever necessary, the energy equation is solved before moving to the next step.

The purpose of this paper is the development of a robust numerical scheme for fluid flow simulations in complex domains with open boundaries.

A modified pressure correction algorithm is presented. The proposed modifications are derived through a step-by-step analysis of the importance of mass continuity enforcement in pressure correction methods, the boundary conditions of the pressure correction equation and the special nature of open boundaries.

The algorithm is validated by performing steady state laminar flow simulations in two backward facing step geometries with progressively truncated outlet channels. The efficiency of the methodology is demonstrated by simulating the pulsatile flow field in a patient specific iliac bifurcation reconstructed by medical imaging data.

The proposed numerical scheme provides accurate and mass conserving solutions in complex domains with open boundaries. The proposed methodology may be directly implemented in any computational domain without any prerequisites regarding the location or type of domain boundaries.

The purpose of this study is to numerically analyze the convective heat transfer features for cooling of an isothermal surface with a cavity-like portion by using CuO-water nano jet. Jet impingement cooling of curved surfaces plays an important role in practical applications. As compared to flat surfaces, fluid flow and convective heat transfer features with jet impingement cooling of a curved surface becomes more complex with additional formation of the vortices and their interaction in the jet wall region. As flow separation and reattachment may appear in a wide range of thermal engineering applications such as electronic cooling, combustors and solar power, jet impingement cooling of a surface which has a geometry with potential separation regions is important from the practical point of view.

Numerical simulations were performed with a finite volume-based solver. The study was performed for various values of the Reynolds number (between 100 and 400), length of the cavity (between 5 w and 40 w), height of the cavity (between w and 5w) and solid nano-particle volume fraction (between 0 and 4 per cent). Artificial neural network modeling was used to obtain a correlation for the average Nusselt number, which can be used to obtain fast and accurate predictions.

It was observed that cavity geometrical parameters of the cooling surface can be adjusted to change the flow field and convective heat transfer features. When the cavity length is low, significant contribution of the inclined wall of the cavity on the average Nusselt number is achieved. As the cavity length and height increase, the average Nusselt number, respectively, reduce and slightly enhance. At the highest value of cavity height, significant changes in the convective flow features are obtained. By using nanofluids instead of water, enhancement of average heat transfer in the range of 35-46 per cent is obtained at the highest particle volume fraction.

In this study, jet impingement cooling of an isothermal surface which has a cavity-like portion was considered with nanofluids. Addition of this portion to the impingement surface has the potential to produce additional vortices which affects the fluid flow and convective features in the jet impingement heat transfer. This geometry has the forward-facing step for the wall jet region with flow separation reattachment in the region. Based on the above literature survey and to the best of the authors’ knowledge, jet impingement cooling for such a geometry has never been reported in the literature despite its importance in practical thermal engineering applications. The results of this study may be useful for design and optimization of such systems and to obtain best performance in terms of fluid flow and heat transfer characteristics.