Numerical study of turbulent forced convection in a finned tube with and without CuO nano fluid

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to carry out a numerical investigation to study forced convection for a tube with fins on the inner and outer surfaces with water as the base fluid and adding particles of CuO to have a nanofluid.

Design/methodology/approach

Three geometries are designed by using Solid Works and the number of inside fins is 20 with height 6 mm and thickness 1 mm. The number of outside fins is 20 with height 12 mm and thickness 1 mm. The length of the tube is 1,000 mm and the inner and outer diameter is 26 and 28 mm, respectively. The annular diameter is 60 mm. The geometries are imported to Gambit where the mesh is chosen and the boundary conditions are specified. The commercial software package Fluent version 14.0 has been used to numerically solve the governing equations for the three cases.

Findings

The temperature contours for the three models at different air velocities, i.e., 5, 7.5 and 10 m/s and water velocities 0.8, 1 and 3 m/s have been investigated. The enhancement of heat transfer by using CuO nanoparticles has been investigated at different nanofluid concentrations.

Originality/value

In this paper, a numerical study is presented to analyze internal and external longitudinal finned tubes with water inside and air outside, with and without nano CuO particles.

Citation

Abbood, S.A. and Sunden, B.A. (2016), "Numerical study of turbulent forced convection in a finned tube with and without CuO nano fluid", International Journal of Numerical Methods for Heat & Fluid Flow, Vol. 26 No. 7, pp. 2252-2270. https://doi.org/10.1108/HFF-04-2015-0146