Graduation Year

2018

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Ph.D.

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Degree Granting Department

Mechanical Engineering

Major Professor

Rasim Guldiken, Ph.D.

Co-Major Professor

Muhammad Rahman, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Frank Pyrtle III, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Sanjukta Bhanja, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Yuncheng You, Ph.D.

Keywords

Air Flow, Heat Transfer, Nozzles, Oven, Parametric Analysis

Abstract

The research work in this dissertation focuses on turbulent air jet heat transfer for commercial cooking applications.

As a part of this study, convective heat transfer coefficient and its interdependency with various key parameters is analyzed for single nozzle turbulent jet impingement. Air is used as the working fluid impinging on the flat surface. A thorough investigation of velocity and temperature distributions is performed by varying nozzle velocity and height over diameter ratio (H/D). Nusselt number and Turbulent Energy are presented for the impingement surface. It was found that for H/D ratios ranging between 6 and 8, nozzle velocities over 20 m/s provide a large percentage increase in heat transfer.

Single nozzle jet impingement is followed by study of turbulent multi-jet impingement. Along with parameters mentioned above, spacing over diameter ratio (S/D) is varied. Convective heat transfer coefficient, average impingement surface temperature and heat transfer rate are calculated over the impingement surface. It was found that higher S/D ratios result in higher local heat transfer coefficient values near stagnation point. However, increased spacing between the neighboring jets results in reduced coverage of the impingement surface lowering the average heat transfer. Lower H/D ratios result in higher heat transfer coefficient peaks. The peaks for all three nozzles are more uniform for H/D ratios between 6 and 8. For a fixed nozzle velocity, heat transfer coefficient values are directly proportional to nozzle diameter. For a fixed H/D and S/D ratio, heat transfer rate and average impingement surface temperature increases as the nozzle velocity increases until it reaches a limiting value. Further increase in nozzle velocity causes drop in heat transfer rate due to ingress of large amounts of cold ambient air in the control volume.

The final part of this dissertation focuses on case study of conveyor oven. Lessons learned from analysis of single and multi-jet impingement are implemented in the case study. A systematic approach is used to arrive to an optimal configuration of the oven. As compared to starting configuration, for optimized configuration the improvement in average heat transfer coefficient was 22.7%, improvement in average surface heat flux was 24.7% and improvement in leakage air mass flow rate was 59.1%.

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