Quantitative Visualization of Mixed Convection in 3-D Rectangular Channels Using TLC Tracers

Abstract

: Experiment is carried out to investigate the mixed convective flow in three-dimensional horizontal rectangular channels filled with high viscous fluid. The particle image velocimetry(PIV) with thermo-sensitive liquid crystal tracers is used for visualizing and analysis. Quantitative data of temperature and velocity are obtained by applying the color-image processing to a visualized image, and neural network is applied to the color-to-temperature calibration. In this study, the fluid used is silicon oil(Pr=909), the aspect ratio(channel width to heigh) is 4 and Reynolds number is 2×10 -2 . From the present study, we can visualize the quantitative temperature and velocity of mixed convective flow in three-dimensional horizontal rectangular channels simultaneously.