Heat transfer and fluid flow characteristics of combined microchannel with cone-shaped micro pin fins

This paper constructs a three-dimensional model to numerically investigate the heat transfer and fluid flow characteristics of combined microchannel with cone-shaped micro pin fins (MCPF) for inlet Re number ranging from 147 to 637. Firstly, the cases of micro pin fins located in the upstream (case1), middle (case2), downstream (case3) of microchannel and distributed throughout the microchannel (case4) are studied with fixed number of fins. Thereafter, the dimensionless parameters of relative fin diameter, relative space between the fins and relative height of the fin are studied to optimize the design. The variations of apparent friction factor f(app),(ave) and average Nusselt number Nu(ave) with inlet Re number have been conducted, and the thermal enhancement factor (eta) has been adopted as evaluation criteria to determine the best comprehensive thermal-hydraulic performance of MCPF. The results show that the microchannel inserted cone-shaped micro pin fins improves the heat transfer accompanied with a higher pressure drop as compared with the smooth rectangular (Rec) microchannel. Microchannel with uniform fins distribution (case4) has the largest eta and the bottom wall temperature is the lowest and well-distributed among all cases. When Re < 500, the overall thermal performance of case3 is better than case1 but when Re > 500, it displays a contrary tendency. The geometric configuration optimization of MCPF suggests that there is an optimum pin diameter, fin space and fin height that satisfy the demands of heat transfer and pressure drop.