Numerical Study and Geometric Investigation of Corrugated Channels Subjected to Forced Convective Flows

The employment of heat exchangers with complex channels has increasing importance in several engineering problems as commercial refrigeration and cooling of electronic packages. One important subject in this kind of device is the design of corrugated channels. Therefore, the present work aims at the geometric optimization of trapezoidal blocks mounted in channels subjected to steady, incompressible, laminar, two-dimensional forced convective flows. The computational domain studied here mimics the corrugated channels commonly found in micro-channel heat exchangers. For the geometrical investigation, it is employed the Constructal Design Method. The numerical simulations were performed for two Reynolds numbers (ReH) equal to 60 and 160 and constant Prandtl number (Pr = 6.99). Results demonstrated that the length/height ratios of both studied blocks (given by L1/H1 and L2/H2 ratios) have the highest sensibility over the thermal performance, showing the importance of the channel's blocks intrusion. It was also shown that the combined analysis of the ratios L1/H1 and L2/H2 was much more efficient for the improvement of the heat transfer rate in the corrugated channels. The thermal performance increased by nearly 65% when the best and worst configurations were compared.