Theoretical Study of Laminar Pulsating Flow in a Pipe

Abstract

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has been carried out to study the convection heat transfer for laminar incompressible pulsating flow inside a circular horizontal pipe. The governing equations and boundary conditions indicate that the sinusoidal pulsating flow is governed by the following controlling parameters: Reynolds number, dimensionless amplitude, dimensionless frequency, Prandtl number and length to diameter ratio. Fluent program software simulator is used to study the dependence of heat transfer rate on the different controlling parameters. Theoretical results show that, for laminar incompressible flow pulsation degrades the time average Nusselt number compared with steady flow. Comparison between the present obtained theoretical results with the previous experimental results shows some agreement especially at higher values of Reynolds number