Turbulent heat transfer in a flow of liquid metals

Abstract The present paper deals with experimental investigations into turbulent heat transfer in a flow of liquid metals. Measurement of the temperature field in the flow as well as the heat transfer coefficient is carried out by methods which take the thermal contact resistance at an interface into consideration. Two phenomena characterizing heat transfer in liquid metals are distinguished with sufficient accuracy, i.e. Combined molecular and turbulent heat transfer, described by a half-empirical heat transfer theory, and the thermal contact resistance in liquid metals on a heat transfer surface, caused by the precipitation of liquid metal oxides in the region of a laminar sublayer and by a number of other factors. The investigations show that the experimental data agrees well with calculated data based on the half-empirical heat transfer theory when the thermal contact resistance is taken into account.