The remarkable ability of viscoelastic fluids to augment local and global surface heat transfer characteristics is demonstrated by new experimental results, which are provided for a rotating Couette flow (RCF) environment (also referred to as von Karman swirling flow) with convective heat transfer. Included are Nusselt number variations, flow visualization results, and spectral analysis of flow static temperature fluctuations. Augmented surface Nusselt numbers are measured for sucrose-based, viscoelastic solutions with polyacrylamide (as they are subject to different magnitudes of flow strain), relative to Newtonian flows and relative to fluids with zero shear rate. The resulting Nusselt number enhancements are related to the experimental conditions that are believed to be associated with the onset and development of elastic instabilities. Resulting comparisons show that the Weissenberg number is the parameter that best correlates and characterizes Nusselt number augmentations, which are strongly correlated with pronounced redistributions of fluorescein FWT red tracer dye fronts, obtained from flow visualizations. As such, the present investigation provides new insight into thermal transport of viscoelastic fluids, and new experimental data that illustrate the utility of different analytic and numerical models for predicting experimental conditions associated with significant Nusselt number augmentations.
Thermal Transport of Viscoelastic Fluids Within Rotating Couette Flows
Journal of Thermophysics and Heat Transfer ; 34 , 1 ; 121-133
2019-09-17
13 pages
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
Steady Hydrodynamics and Thermal Behaviors of Fluid Flows in Micro - Parallel Plates (Couette Flows)
British Library Conference Proceedings | 2012
|Linear instability of compressible plane Couette flows
AIAA | 1997
|