Investigation on heat transfer enhancement and pressure loss of double swirl chambers cooling

By merging two standard swirl chambers, an alternative cooling configuration named double swirl chambers (DSC) has been developed. In the DSC cooling configuration, the main physical phenomena of the swirl flow in swirl chamber and the advantages of swirl flow in heat transfer augmentation are maintained. Additionally, three new physical phenomena can be found in DSC cooling configuration, which result in a further improvement of the heat transfer: (1) impingement effect has been observed, (2) internal heat exchange has been enhanced between fluids in two swirls, and (3) “∞” shape swirl has been generated because of cross effect between two chambers, which improves the mixing of the fluids. Because of all these improvements, the DSC cooling configuration leads to a higher globally-averaged thermal performance parameter (Nu¯¯/Nu∞/(f/f0)1/3) than standard swirl chamber. In particular, at the inlet region, the augmentation of the heat transfer is nearly 7.5 times larger than the fully developed non-swirl turbulent flow and the circumferentially averaged Nusselt number coefficient is 41% larger than the standard swirl chamber. Within the present work, a further investigation on the DSC cooling configuration has been focused on the influence of geometry parameters e.g. merging ratio of chambers and aspect ratio of inlet duct on the cooling performance. The results show a very large influence of these geometry parameters in heat transfer enhancement and pressure drop ratio. Compared with the basic configuration of DSC cooling, the improved configuration with 20% to 23% merging ratio shows the highest globally-averaged thermal performance parameter. With the same cross section area in tangential inlet ducts, the DSC cooling channel with larger aspect ratio shows larger heat transfer enhancement and at the same time reduced pressure drop ratio, which results in a better globally-averaged thermal performance parameter.