Abstract
This paper presents experimental measurements and CFD calculations for heat transfer and flow friction factor in a staggered pin fin array. The heat transfer and flow friction factor data are taken in a constant temperature facility and are acquired over a Reynolds number range of 1500 to 31,000. The array is comprised of eight rows of pins spaced at 2.5 diameters in the streamwise and spanwise directions with a pin height of two diameters. The heat transfer data are presented in terms of both average array data and row resolved data. The data accurately match the recent pin fin correlation of Chyu et at. [1] and extend its range to lower Reynolds numbers. The flow friction factor data accurately match the low and high Reynolds number data of Metzger et al. [2].
The steady state computations for a 2D and 3D representation of the geometry are performed and compared with archival correlations and the present data. The calculations are performed using a general purpose commercial solver (FLUENT 5.3 [3]) and apply the realizable k-ε model of Shih et al. [4] along with a two layer model which solves the k equation in the near wall region. Generally, the calculations perform relatively well with the 2D calculations matching the literature correlations slightly better than the 3D calculations.
