Forced convection heat transfer in tube banks in cross flow

The forced convection heat transfer characteristics for an incompressible, steady and Newtonian fluid flow over a bundle of circular cylinders has been investigated numerically. The inter-cylinder hydrodynamic interactions have been approximated by employing a simple cell model. The momentum and energy equations have been solved by using a finite difference based numerical solution procedure for a range of physical and kinematic conditions. Further-more, the role of the type of thermal boundary condition, namely, a constant temperature or a constant heat flux, imposed on the surface of the cylinder has also been elucidated. Extensive results on the temperature fields, and on the variation of the Nusselt number on the surface of a typical cylinder in the assemblage have been obtained for two values of the Prandtl number (corresponding to air and water). The Reynolds number of flow was varied in the range 1-500 and the voidage of the assemblage ranged from 0.4 to 0.99 thereby covering the entire range of interest as encountered in tubular heat exchangers and in fibrous beds. The paper is concluded by presenting extensive comparisons with the limited analytical/numerical and/or experimental results available in the literature for the case of a single cylinder as well as that for tube bundles. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.