An Experimental and Numerical Study of Heat Transfer From Arrays of Impinging Jets With Surface Ribs

A combined experimental and numerical investigation of the heat transfer characteristics within arrays of impinging jets with rib-roughened surfaces is presented. Two configurations are considered: One with an inline arrangement of jets and ribs oriented perpendicular to the direction of cross-flow and one with a staggered arrangement of jets and broken ribs aligned with the direction of cross-flow. For both cases, the jet Reynolds number is 35,000, the separation distance measures H/D = 3, the spent air is routed through one exit contributing to the maximum cross-flow condition, and the rib height and width is both 1 D. The experiments are carried out in perspex models using the transient liquid crystal method. Local jet temperatures are measured at several positions on the impingement plate to account for an exact evaluation of the heat transfer coefficient. In addition to the measurements, a numerical analysis using the commercial CFD software package ANSYS CFX is conducted. Heat transfer predictions are compared with those obtained from experiments with regards to local distributions as well as averaged quantities. A good overall agreement is found but discrepancies for local values need to be accepted. The present investigation also emphasizes that configurations including rib roughness elements should be compared based on the amount of transferred heat flux in order to account for the area enlarging effect. This allows a correct evaluation of the thermal performance.