Unsteady Forced Convection Heat Transfer for Power Law Fluids in a Pipe

This paper studied the problem of forced convection heat transfer for power law fluids in a pipe which was affected by the varying inlet temperature. The fluid flow was hydrodynamically fully-developed and laminar while the effects of viscous dissipation and the power law kinematic viscosity on heat transfer were considered. A control volume technique based on the finite difference model coupled with the LU decomposition method was adopted and the least squares polynomial was introduced to approximate the non-linear items. The results show that the heat transfer behaviors are strongly depending on the value of the power law index. It is found that the thermal wave of the inlet temperature has less penetration with the increasing axial coordinate, and the effect of heat transfer is dominant away from the wall. The temperature profile is flatter as the power law index increases, which is implies that the shear-thickening non-Newtonian flows are affected easier by the inlet temperature than the shear-thinning fluids.