Papers presented to the 11th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, South Africa, 20-23 July 2015.
This paper presents thermal management of heat
transfer density rate from heated blocks mounted on a
horizontal wall of a rectangular enclosure and subject to forced
convection. The governing equations for mass, momentum and
energy for laminar flow and convective heat transfer are solved
in three-dimensions using a commercial Computational Fluids
Dynamics (CFD) code. First numerical results validated with
available experimental data showed that the rate of heat transfer
increase with the Reynolds number. Thereafter a numerical
optimization procedure is carried out in order to obtain the
optimal blocks configuration that maximizes the heat transfer
density rate and minimizes the peak temperature in the
enclosure by selecting the sides of the blocks as design
variables whilst the total volume is maintained constant. In
term of the thermal performance of the heat transfer mechanism
described by the dimensionless global conductance as well as
by the overall Nusselt number, the results showed that optimal
configurations were such that none of the blocks aspect ratio
was equal to one. However thermal performance was much
better when either the height-to-length ratio (B/G) or the heightto-
width (B/C) ratio tends to its maximum. These optimal
results obtained numerically are found to be fairly reliable.
