Control of heat transfer by oscillatory flow in a water filled enclosure

In this study, a shallow enclosure filled with water is considered. An oscillatory flow field is created by the harmonic vibration of an enclosure side wall. The heat transfer due to the temperature gradient between the left and the right walls of the enclosure is numerically simulated. In literature, oscillatory driven flow of liquid water is rarely studied. To our best knowledge the present work is the first study which directly simulates the acoustically driven motion of water and associated thermal transport. Here it is important to note that the present investigation focuses on non-zero mean oscillatory flows in liquid water. The fully compressible form of two dimensional Navier-Stokes equations and an equation of state for liquid water are employed in order to evaluate the flow and thermal fields in the enclosure. In order to compute the transport phenomenon in the enclosure accurately, liquid water is modeled as a compressible fluid with a suitable equation of state. The governing equations are discritized by using a control volume based, explicit time marching, flux corrected transport algorithm (FCT). The code validation is performed by comparing particle (flow) velocities with theoretically estimated (based on acoustic relations) values. Both 'oscillatory' and pseudo-steady 'cycle averaged' velocity values are computed. According to the results of this study, it can be concluded that the heat transfer in the enclosure is considerably enhanced by oscillatory flow. Heat transfer is augmented with increasing maximum displacement of the left wall. Besides an optimum enclosure height is found to achieve higher heat transfer rate. The results of this study can be a guide for the design of oscillation controlled heat transport tubes. Keywords: Oscillatory flow, forced convection, compressible flow, FCT.