Heat transfer investigations on impinging flame jets of a multi-port convex burner

Multi-port curved surface burners are used in industrial boilers, preheating of large diameter pipes, textile industries, preheating of cylindrical metal billets and other industrial applications. The present work reports the heat transfer characteristics of convex shaped burner with 49 inline ports arranged in an array of 7 each. The methane-air premixed flame jets are impinged on the concave surface of a curved plate placed with radial spacing of 12 mm. Two different burners with port diameters of 2 mm and 3 mm with pitch to diameter ratio of 2.33 are used. The flame jet is studied for Reynolds number (Re) ranging from 75 to 200 and equivalence ratio of 0.9-1.5. The characterisation is done by impinging the pre-characterised air jets of various flow rates on the rear surface and capturing the wall temperature. The wall temperature is analysed to get the distributions of Nusselt number and effectiveness. The variation of coefficient of variance of Nusselt number, average Nusselt number and thermal efficiency is reported in the present work. The Nusselt number and effectiveness distributions increase with the increase in mixture Reynolds number. For a fixed mixture Reynolds number, the optimum heat transfer is obtained for stoichiometric flame. The thermal efficiency and average heat transfer of 2 mm port diameter is observed to be 18-25% higher as compared with burner with port diameter of 3 mm. Correlations are developed to predict the average Nusselt number, average effectiveness, coefficient of variance (COV) of Nusselt number distribution and thermal efficiency.