Effect of perforated concave delta winglet vortex generators on heat transfer augmentation of fluid flow inside a rectangular channel: an experimental study

Abstract

Compact heat exchanger with gas as a heat exchange mediumis widely used in power plants, automotive, air conditioning, and others. However, the gas has a low thermal conductivity resulting in high thermal resistance causing a low rate of heat transfer. Therefore an improvement to the convection heat transfer coefficient is necessary. One way to enhance the convection heat transfer coefficient is to use a longitudinal vortex generator. However, the increase in convection heat transfer coefficient is followed by an increase in pressure drop. Therefore, this work aims to improve the convection heat transfer coefficient with a low pressure drop. To achieve this goal, experiments were carried out by perforating a longitudinal vortex generator with a diameter of 5 mm with variations in holes number one, two and three. Two types of longitudinal vortex generators are compared. The experimental results show that the convection heat transfer coefficient for the case of perforated concave delta winglet vortex generator is only decreased by 1% from that without a hole, while the pressure drop is decreased by 11.6%.