Heat Transfer Characteristics of Compressible Laminar Flow Through Microtubes

This paper describes experimental results on heat transfer characteristics of gaseous flow in a microtube with constant wall temperature. The experiments were performed for nitrogen gas flow through three microtubes of 123 μm, 163 μm, and 243 μm in diameter with 50mm in length, respectively. The wall temperature was maintained at 310 K, 330 K, and 350 K by circulating water around the microtube, respectively. The stagnation pressure is chosen in such a way that the exit Mach number ranges from 0.1 to 1.0. The outlet pressure was fixed at the atmospheric condition. The total temperature at the outlet, the inlet stagnation temperature, the mass flow rate, and the inlet pressure were measured. The numerical computations based on the Arbitrary-Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) method were also performed with the same conditions of the experiment for validation of numerical results. Both the results are in excellent agreement. In some cases, the total temperatures obtained by the present experimental study are higher than the wall temperature. This is due to the additional heat transfer from the wall to the gas near the microtube outlet caused by the temperature fall due to the energy conversion into the kinetic energy. A quantitative correlation for the prediction of the heat transfer rate of the gaseous flow in microtubes which had been proposed in our previous study (Hong and Asako, 2007, “Heat Transfer Characteristics of Gaseous Flows in a Microchannel and a Microtube with Constant Wall Temperature,” Numer. Heat Transfer, Part A, 52, pp. 219–238) was validated.