摘要
The present work focuses on experimental and numerical investigations of the augmentation of turbulent flow heat transfer in a horizontal circular tube by means of mesh inserts with air as the working fluid. Sixteen types of mesh inserts with screen diameters of 22 mm, 18 mm, 14 mm and 10 mm for varying distance between the screens of 50 mm, 100 mm, 150 mm and 200 mm in the porosity range of 99.73 to 99.98 were considered for experimentation. The horizontal tube was subjected to constant and uniform heat flux. The Reynolds number varied from 7,000 to 14,000. The results are compared with the clear flow case when no porous material was used. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques were also employed to perform optimization analysis of the mesh inserts. The horizontal tube along with mesh inserts was modeled in Gambit 2.2.30 with fine meshing and analyzed using FLUENT 6.2.16. CFD analysis was performed initially for plain tube and the results are compared with experimental values for validation.