Date of Award

12-17-2003

Document Type

Thesis

Abstract

Oscillatory flows have gained considerable research attention in the recent decades following an interest in transport enhancement in micro-electronic devices. Heat transfer enhancement due to flow modulation has an inherent advantage over conventional mechanical heat transfer components in terms of reduction in weight and space. The present work is aimed at studying fluid flow in oscillating square cavities as a first step towards heat transfer enhancement. A commercial CFD code, Fluent, was used to model a test case consisting of Stokes' second problem, with a source code written in the C programming language. The simulated results were in good agreement with the analytical results found in the literature. Since the description of an oscillatory boundary condition in complex geometries would prove to be a difficult exercise because of the presence of spanwise walls, Newton's second law of motion for accelerating reference frames was used. This method proved to be an effective one computationally and the results agreed well with the analytical results. The cavity problem was analyzed using Fluent with the Non-Newtonian formulation described above. Fluid dynamic characteristics were studied with respect to dimensionless parameters and they exhibited an explicit dependence on these parameters.

Handle

http://hdl.handle.net/11122/6292

Download

Share

COinS