Boundary element method applied to a gas-fired pin-fin-enhanced heat pipe

The thermal conduction of a portion of an enhanced surface heat exchanger for a gas fired heat pipe solar receiver was modeled using the boundary element and finite element methods (BEM and FEM) to determine the effect of weld fillet size on performance of a stud welded pin fin. A process that could be utilized by others for designing the surface mesh on an object of interest, performing a conversion from the mesh into the input format utilized by the BEM code, obtaining output on the surface of the object, and displaying visual results was developed. It was determined that the weld fillet on the pin fin significantly enhanced the heat performance, improving the operating margin of the heat exchanger. The performance of the BEM program on the pin fin was measured (as computational time) and used as a performance comparison with the FEM model. Given similar surface element densities, the BEM method took longer to get a solution than the FEM method. The FEM method creates a sparse matrix that scales in storage and computation as the number of nodes (N), whereas the BEM method scales as N{sup 2} in storage and N{sup 3} in computation.