Proceedings of the First International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics

1st International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Kruger Park, 8-10 April 2002.This lecture is a principle-based review of a growing body of fundamental work stimulated by multiple opportunities to optimize geometric form (shape, structure, configuration, rhythm, topology, architecture, geography) in systems for heat and fluid flow. Currents flow against resistances, and by generating entropy (irreversibility) they force the system global performance to levels lower than the theoretical limit. The system design is destined to remain imperfect because of constraints (finite sizes, costs, times). Improvements can be achieved by properly balancing the resistances, i.e., by spreading the imperfections through the system. Optimal spreading means to endow the system with geometric form. The system construction springs out of the constrained maximization of global performance. This 'constructal' design principle is reviewed by highlighting applications from heat transfer engineering. Several examples illustrate the optimized internal structure of convection cooled packages of electronics. The origin of optimal geometric features lies in the global effort to use every volume element to the maximum, i.e., to pack the element not only with the most heat generating components, but also with the most flow, in such a way that every fluid packet is effectively engaged in cooling. In flows that connect a point to a volume or an area, the resulting structure is a tree with high conductivity branches and low-conductivity interstices.tm201

Numerical Simulation of Convective-Radiative Heat Transfer

This book presents numerical, experimental, and analytical analysis of convective and radiative heat transfer in various engineering and natural systems, including transport phenomena in heat exchangers and furnaces, cooling of electronic heat-generating elements, and thin-film flows in various technical systems. It is well known that such heat transfer mechanisms are dominant in the systems under consideration. Therefore, in-depth study of these regimes is vital for both the growth of industry and the preservation of natural resources. The authors included in this book present insightful and provocative studies on convective and radiative heat transfer using modern analytical techniques. This book will be very useful for academics, engineers, and advanced students

Computational Heat Transfer and Fluid Mechanics

With the advances in high-speed computer technology, complex heat transfer and fluid flow problems can be solved computationally with high accuracy. Computational modeling techniques have found a wide range of applications in diverse fields of mechanical, aerospace, energy, environmental engineering, as well as numerous industrial systems. Computational modeling has also been used extensively for performance optimization of a variety of engineering designs. The purpose of this book is to present recent advances, as well as up-to-date progress in all areas of innovative computational heat transfer and fluid mechanics, including both fundamental and practical applications. The scope of the present book includes single and multiphase flows, laminar and turbulent flows, heat and mass transfer, energy storage, heat exchangers, respiratory flows and heat transfer, biomedical applications, porous media, and optimization. In addition, this book provides guidelines for engineers and researchers in computational modeling and simulations in fluid mechanics and heat transfer

The Fifth Annual Thermal and Fluids Analysis Workshop

The Fifth Annual Thermal and Fluids Analysis Workshop was held at the Ohio Aerospace Institute, Brook Park, Ohio, cosponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, 16-20 Aug. 1993. The workshop consisted of classes, vendor demonstrations, and paper sessions. The classes and vendor demonstrations provided participants with the information on widely used tools for thermal and fluid analysis. The paper sessions provided a forum for the exchange of information and ideas among thermal and fluids analysts. Paper topics included advances and uses of established thermal and fluids computer codes (such as SINDA and TRASYS) as well as unique modeling techniques and applications

Experimental Study of Choking Flow of Water at Supercritical Conditions

Les prochaines générations de réacteurs nucléaires vont opérer avec un fluide de refroidissement dont la pression sera près de 25 MPa et dont la température de sortie sera de 500°C à 625°C, selon le type de réacteur. En conséquence, l’enthalpie du flux de sortie de ces futurs réacteurs à eau supercritique, SCWR, «Supercritical Water-Cooled Reactors» sera beaucoup plus élevée que celle des réacteurs actuels. Cela permettra à l’efficacité des centrales nucléaires de passer d’environ 30-33% aujourd’hui jusqu’à 48%. Cependant, le comportement thermo-hydraulique de l’eau supercritique n’est pas encore bien compris sous de telles conditions d’écoulement, notamment en ce qui concerne par exemple les chutes de pression, la convection forcée, la détérioration du transfert de chaleur et le flux massique critique. Jusqu’à maintenant, seul un nombre très limité de recherches ont été effectuées utilisant des fluides en conditions supercritiques. De plus, ces recherches n’ont pas été effectuées dans des conditions représentatives des SCWR. Aussi, les données existantes au sujet du flux massique critique ont été recueillies lors d’expériences dont la pression de décharge était celle de l’atmosphère ambiante, et dans la plupart des cas en utilisant des fluides autres que l’eau. Il est à noter que la compréhension de l’écoulement critique des fluides supercritiques est essentielle pour effectuer les analyses de sûreté des futurs réacteurs nucléaires et pour concevoir leurs principaux composants mécaniques, par exemple, les valves de contrôle et les vannes de sûreté. Ainsi donc, une installation d’eau supercritique a été construite à l’École Polytechnique de Montréal pour effectuer des recherches sur le débit critique. Ce montage expérimental consiste en deux boucles fonctionnant en parallèle, servant à déterminer les conditions d’écoulement qui déclenchent le débit critique de l’eau supercritique. Cette installation est également en mesure d’effectuer des expériences de transfert de chaleur et de perte de pression utilisant de l’eau en conditions supercritiques. Dans cette thèse, seront présentés les résultats obtenus grâce à cette installation avec l’utilisation d’une section d’essais munie d’un orifice de 1 mm de diamètre interne et de 3,17 mm de longueur, et dont les rebords sont acérés. Ainsi, 545 points de données de flux massique critique ont été obtenus en conditions supercritiques, pour des pressions d’écoulement allant de 22,1 MPa à 32,1MPa, et à des températures d’écoulement allant de 50°C à 502°C, et ce pour des pressions de décharges 0,1 MPa à 3,6 MPa.----------Abstract Future nuclear reactors will operate at a coolant pressure close to 25 MPa and at outlet temperatures ranging from 500oC to 625°C. As a result, the outlet flow enthalpy in future Supercritical Water-Cooled Reactors (SCWR) will be much higher than those of actual ones which can increase overall nuclear plant efficiencies up to 48%. However, under such flow conditions, the thermal-hydraulic behavior of supercritical water is not fully known, e.g., pressure drop, forced convection and heat transfer deterioration, critical and blowdown flow rate, etc. Up to now, only a very limited number of studies have been performed under supercritical conditions. Moreover, these studies are conducted at conditions that are not representative of future SCWRs. In addition, existing choked flow data have been collected from experiments at atmospheric discharge pressure conditions and in most cases by using working fluids different than water which constrain researchers to analyze the data correctly. In particular, the knowledge of critical (choked) discharge of supercritical fluids is mandatory to perform nuclear reactor safety analyses and to design key mechanical components (e.g., control and safety relief valves, etc.). Hence, an experimental supercritical water facility has been built at École Polytechnique de Montréal which allows researchers to perform choking flow experiments under supercritical conditions. The facility can also be used to carry out heat transfer and pressure drop experiments under supercritical conditions. In this thesis, we present the results obtained at this facility using a test section that contains a 1 mm inside diameter, 3.17 mm long orifice plate with sharp edges. Thus, 545 choking flow of water data points are obtained under supercritical conditions for flow pressures ranging from 22.1 MPa to 32.1 MPa, flow temperatures ranging from 50°C to 502°C and for discharge pressures from 0.1 MPa to 3.6 MPa. Obtained data are compared with the data given in the literature including those collected with fluids other than water. It is also important to mention that present models used to predict supercritical choking flows have been developed for fluids under subcritical conditions. Even though none of these models were developed to handle the expansion of supercritical fluids, we tested some of the models (Homogenous Equilibrium Model, Modified-Homogeneous Equilibrium Model and Bernoulli equation) under supercritical conditions and compared their predictions with our data and those of other researchers, available in the literature. In addition, a simple polytropic model is proposed to estimate the critical flow rate of water

Improvement of the Decay Heat Removal Characteristics of the Generation IV Gas-cooled Fast Reactor

Gas cooling in nuclear power plants (NPPs) has a long history, the corresponding reactor types developed in France, the UK and the US having been thermal neutron-spectrum systems using graphite as the moderator. The majority of NPPs worldwide, however, are currently light water reactors, using ordinary water as both coolant and moderator. These NPPs – of the so-called second generation – will soon need replacement, and a third generation is now being made available, offering increased safety while still based on light water technology. For the longer-term future, viz. beyond the year 2030, R&D is currently ongoing on Generation IV NPPs, aimed at achieving closure of the nuclear fuel cycle, and hence both drastically improved utilization of fuel resources and minimization of long-lived radioactive wastes. Since the very beginning of the international cooperation on Generation IV, viz. the year 2000, the main research interest in Europe as regards the advanced fast-spectrum systems needed for achieving complete fuel cycle closure, has been for the Sodium-cooled Fast Reactor (SFR). However, the Gas-cooled Fast Reactor (GFR) is currently considered as the main back-up solution. Like the SFR, the GFR is an efficient breeder, also able to work as iso-breeder using simply natural uranium as feed and producing waste which is predominantly in the form of fission products. The main drawback of the GFR is the difficulty to evacuate decay heat following a loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA) due to the low thermal inertia of the core, as well as to the low coolant density. The present doctoral research focuses on the improvement of decay heat removal (DHR) for the Generation-IV GFR. The reference GFR system design considered in the thesis is the 2006 CEA concept, with a power of 2400 MWth. The CEA 2006 DHR strategy foresees, in all accidental cases (independent of the system pressure), that the reactor is shut down. For high-pressure events, dedicated DHR loops with blowers and heat exchangers are designed to operate when the power conversion system cannot be used to provide acceptable core temperatures under natural convection conditions. For depressurized events, the strategy relies on a dedicated small containment (called the guard containment) providing an intermediate back-up pressure. The DHR blowers, designed to work under these pressure conditions, need to be powered either by the power grid or by batteries for at least 24 hours. The specific contributions of the present research – aimed at achieving enhanced passivity of the DHR system for the GFR – are design and analysis related to (1) the injection of heavy gas into the primary circuit after a LOCA, to enable natural convection cooling at an intermediate-pressure level, and (2) an autonomous Brayton loop to evacuate decay heat at low primary pressure in case of a loss of the guard-containment pressure. Both these developments reduce the dependence on blower power availability considerably. First, the thermal-hydraulic codes used in the study – TRACE and CATHARE – are validated for gas cooling. The validation includes benchmark comparisons between the codes, serving to identify the sensitivity of the results to the different modeling assumptions. The parameters found to be the most sensitive in this analysis, such as heat transfer and friction models, are then validated via a detailed re-analysis of earlier PSI (EIR, at the time) gas-loop experiments conducted in the 1970s. Conclusions and recommendations on the models to be used for transient analysis are derived. In general, it has been shown that the agreement, between experiments and the correlations for heat transfer and friction used in TRACE and CATHARE, is quite satisfactory. The thus validated codes are then used in the two detailed, DHR improvement studies carried out. The first improvement of the reference DHR strategy is the heavy gas injection. Assuming a DHR blower failure after a LOCA, the helium pressure in the guard containment is not high enough to evacuate the decay heat by natural convection. To improve the natural convection, the effects of injecting different heavy gases (N2, CO2, Ar and a N2/He mixture) into the primary circuit were analyzed, in order to address the possibility of dealing with DHR-blower failure while accepting an intermediate back-up pressure in the guard containment. Furthermore, different injection locations and injection mass flows were considered, and the sensitivity to the number of available DHR loops and LOCA break-sizes was also addressed. It has been found that injecting the heavy gas in the vicinity of the core could lead to overcooling problems. For an injection point sufficiently far from the core, however, both CO2 and N2 are found to be able to cool the core satisfactorily in natural convection. N2 is proposed as the reference, due to possible chemical problems with CO2. The second proposition for DHR improvement is related to the possibility of a simultaneous guard-containment failure, i.e. a loss-of-back-up-pressure (LOBP) combined with a blower failure after a LOCA. In this case the natural convection, even with heavy gas injection, is no longer strong enough to evacuate the decay heat. To address this issue, the possibility of decay heat removal via use of a dedicated autonomous Brayton cycle – as a standalone DHR loop – has been investigated. First, an analytical Brayton cycle model has been set up, so as to identify convenient machine design points and to study the machine's off-design behavior. Two machine designs have then been drawn up: one for helium in order to provide a reference for understanding the Brayton loop behavior in a generic sense, and the other for nitrogen which is the envisaged gas to be injected after a LOCA. Both, the design of the proposed devices and their validation are discussed. Finally, a detailed transient analysis, involving usage of both heavy-gas injection and the Brayton device (i.e. of the complete, proposed DHR system), is presented. This serves to illustrate the effectiveness of the new strategy for the highly hypothetical worst-case scenario of sequential failures following a LOCA

VISUALIZATION AND CHARACTERIZATION OF ULTRASONIC CAVITATING ATOMIZER AND OTHER AUTOMOTIVE PAINT SPRAYERS USING INFRARED THERMOGRAPHY

The disintegration of a liquid jet emerging from a nozzle has been under investigation for several decades. A direct consequence of the liquid jet disintegration process is droplet formation. The breakup of a liquid jet into discrete droplets can be brought about by the use of a diverse forcing mechanism. Cavitation has been thought to assist the atomization process. Previous experimental studies, however, have dealt with cavitation as a secondary phenomenon assisting the primary atomization mechanism. In this dissertation, the role of the energy created by the collapse of cavitation bubbles, together with the liquid pressure perturbation is explicitly configured as a principal mechanism for the disintegration of the liquid jet. A prototype of an atomizer that uses this concept as a primary atomization mechanism was developed and experimentally tested using water as working fluid. The atomizer fabrication process and the experimental characterization results are presented. The parameters tested include liquid injection pressure, ultrasonic horn tip frequency, and the liquid flow rate. The experimental results obtained demonstrate improvement in the atomization of water. To fully characterize the new atomizer, a novel infrared thermography-based technique for the characterization and visualization of liquid sprays was developed. The technique was tested on the new atomizer and two automotive paint applicators. The technique uses an infrared thermography-based measurement in which a uniformly heated background acts as a thermal radiation source, and an infrared camera as the receiver. The infrared energy emitted by the source in traveling through the spray is attenuated by the presence of the droplets. The infrared intensity is captured by the receiver showing the attenuation in the image as a result of the presence of the spray. The captured thermal image is used to study detailed macroscopic features of the spray flow field and the evolution of the droplets as they are transferred from the applicator to the target surface. In addition, the thermal image is post-processed using theoretical and empirical equations to extract information from which the liquid volume fraction and number density within the spray are estimated

Aeronautical engineering: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 309)

This bibliography lists 212 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in Oct. 1994. Subject coverage includes: design, construction and testing of aircraft and aircraft engines; aircraft components, equipment, and systems; ground support systems; and theoretical and applied aspects of aerodynamics and general fluid dynamics

Aeronautical engineering: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 270)

This bibliography lists 600 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in September, 1991. Subject coverage includes: design, construction and testing of aircraft and aircraft engines; aircraft components, equipment and systems; ground support systems; and theoretical and applied aspects of aerodynamics and general fluid dynamics