Open AccessThe work concerns the simulating peculiarities of heat transfer to the gas coolants with low values of the Prandtl number, in particular, to the binary mixtures of inert gases.
The paper presents simulation results of heat transfer to the fully established flow of a helium-xenon mixture in the round tube of 6 mm in diameter with the boundary condition of the second kind. It considers a flow of three helium-xenon mixtures with different helium content and molecular Prandtl numbers within the range 0.239–0.322 and with Reynolds numbers ranged from 10000 to 50000. During numerical simulation a temperature factor changed from 1.034 to 1.061. CFD-code STAR-CCM+ that is designed for solving a wide range of problems of hydrodynamics, heat transfer and stress was used as the primary software.
The applicability of the five models for the turbulent Prandtl number is examined. It is shown that the choice of the model has a significant influence on the heat transfer coefficient. The paper presents structural characteristics of the flow in the wall region. It estimates a thermal stabilization section to be approximately as long as 30 diameters of tube.
Simulation results are compared with the known data on heat transfer to gas coolants with low values of the Prandtl number. It is shown that V2F low-Reynolds number -ε turbulence model with an approximation for the turbulent Prandtl number used according Kays-CrawfordWeigand gives the best compliance with the results predicted by relationships of Kays W.M. and Petukhov B.S. The approximating correlation summarizes a set of simulation results.
Application of the work results is reasonable when conducting the numerical simulation of heat transfer to binary gas mixtures in channels of different forms. The presented approximating correlation allows rapid estimate of heat transfer coefficients to the gas coolants with a low value of the molecular Prandl number within the investigated range with a flow through the circular tube.