Heat transfer investigations on methane-air premixed flame jet exiting from a circular nozzle and impinging over semi-cylindrical surfaces

The flame jet impingement on curved surfaces finds applications in various direct flame heating situations. The design of heating equipment demands the estimation of the surface temperature and of the convective heat flux to the target surface at steady state for various impingement parameters. The characterisation of flame jets in terms of Nusselt number and effectiveness aids the designer to numerically estimate the steady state surface temperature and heat flux by specifying the convective boundary condition with spatial distribution of reference temperature. The present study reports the heat transfer characteristics of single flame jet impinging on convex and concave surfaces of a semi-cylindrical target plate. The effects of mixture Reynolds number, equivalence ratio, curvature ratio and burner to plate spacing on the heat transfer behavior are investigated. The uniformity of the heat flux distribution and the overall thermal efficiency are determined from the local heat flux distributions. The flow fields along the curvilinear axes influence the overall thermal performance. The concave surface produces higher thermal efficiency and better uniformity of heat flux over the impingement surface as compared with the convex surface.