Thermalhydraulic analysis of four geometrical design parameters in rib-roughened channels

The present article reports RANS simulations of the flow and heat transfer in a 2-dimensional rib-roughened passage. The effects of four different geometrical factors including rib profile, rib pitch-to-height ratio, rib height, and rib width are investigated. The Reynolds number, based on the channel bulk velocity and hydraulic diameter, is 30,000. Two low-Reynolds-number linear EVMs, namely the Menter k-ω-SST model and a variant of Durbin's v²-f formulation, are examined. All computations are undertaken using the commercial CFD code STAR-CD. In comparison with experimental data, it emerges that the v²-f model generally returns more accurate results than the k-ω-SST closure.