0000000001179426

AUTHOR

I. Di Piazza

Investigation of Flow and Heat Transfer in Corrugated-Undulated Plate Heat Exchangers

An experimental and numerical investigation of heat transfer and fluid flow was conducted for corrugated-undulated plate heat exchanger configurations under transitional and weakly turbulent conditions. For a given geometry of the corrugated plates the geometrical characteristics of the undulated plates, the angle formed by the latter with the main flow direction, and the Reynolds number were made to vary. Distributions of the local heat transfer coefficient were obtained by using liquid-crystal thermography, and surface-averaged values were computed; friction coefficients were measured by wall pressure tappings. Overall heat transfer and pressure drop correlations were derived. Three-dimen…

research product

Efficient parallel computations of flows of arbitrary fluids for all regimes of Reynolds, Mach and Grashof numbers

This paper presents a unified numerical method able to address a wide class of fluid flow problems of engineering interest. Arbitrary fluids are treated specifying totally arbitrary equations of state, either in analytical form or through look‐up tables. The most general system of the unsteady Navier–Stokes equations is integrated with a coupled implicit preconditioned method. The method can stand infinite CFL number and shows the efficiency of a quasi‐Newton method independent of the multi‐block partitioning on parallel machines. Computed test cases ranging from inviscid hydrodynamics, to natural convection loops of liquid metals, and to supersonic gasdynamics, show a solution efficiency i…

research product

Steady, periodic, quasi-periodic and chaotic flow regimes in toroidal pipes

Incompressible flow in a toroidal pipe was investigated by direct numerical simulation. The curvature a/c (radius of the cross section / radius of the torus) was 0.3 or 0.1 and the bulk Reynolds number ranged between 3500 and 14 700. The study revealed a rich scenario of transition to turbulence. For the higher curvature a/c = 0.3, a supercritical transition from stationary to periodic flow (Hopf bifurcation) was observed at Re=4600. The periodic flow was characterized by a travelling wave which, in the whole periodic Re range, took the form of a varicose modulation of the twin Dean vortex rings, included 8 wavelengths along the axis of the torus, and exhibited instantaneous anti-symmetry a…

research product