Forced Convection Analysis of an Oscillating Blade in a Straight Channel: Effects of Blade's Initial Position

The present computational study examines the transient analysis of forced convective flow and heat transfer in a long open channel with an oscillating blade initially placed either horizontally or vertically to investigate the impacts on the heat transfer performance and pressure drop in the channel of the blade's position. For mathematical modeling, the Arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian finite element method has been employed to precisely model the moving mesh boundary conditions under various simulation parameters. Simulations are performed for the Reynolds number, Re = 50, and Prandtl number, Pr = 1. The nondimensional maximum linear velocity and oscillating frequency are modified with the values V_m = 0.5, 1.0, 2.0, and F_c = 0.2, 0.5, 0.8. The results show that the vertically positioned blade provides the best thermal performance at V_m = 1.0 and F_c = 0.8, together with the maximum average cavity pressure drop, while the horizontally positioned blade becomes the least thermoefficient at V_m = 0.5 and F_c = 0.8, with the corresponding lowest average pressure drop. It can also be observed that the initial blade position significantly impacts both heat transfer and pressure drop characteristics. A vertically positioned blade demonstrates superior heat transfer performance compared with a horizontally positioned blade. The analysis may be crucial for determining the impact of an oscillating body on the heat transfer and pressure drop encountered in different high heat flux applications, like, crystal formation, high-performance building insulation, solar distiller, solar energy collectors, nuclear reactors, electronic device cooling, drying technology, and so forth.