Micro Convective Heat Transfer of Gas Flow Subject to H and T Boundary Conditions

Abstract

This paper focuses on experimental and numerical analysis of convective heat transfer characteristics of pressure-driven gaseous flows through microtubes, which is frequently encountered in practical application of microfluidic devices accommodating gas flow, heat transfer and/or chemical reactions at microscale. The present work has been carried out with the objectives to: (i) verify the applicability of conventional theory for the prediction of internal forced convection heat transfer coefficient for tubes having an inner diameter lower than 1 mm and (ii) check the performance of some specific correlations proposed for the analysis of forced micro convection with gases in the last decades. Single commercial stainless steel microtubes are tested with inner diameters ranging from 1 mm down to 0.17 mm. The most common thermal boundary conditions, namely uniform heat flux (H boundary condition) and uniform wall temperature (T boundary condition), have been implemented by applying Joule heating on external s...