Heat Transfer Augmentation in Developing Flow Through a Ribbed Square Duct

An experimental study is conducted to investigate the heat transfer augmentation in developing turbulent flowthrough a ribbed square duct.The duct is made of 16mm thick bakelite sheet.The bottom surface of the ribbedwall having rib pitch to height ratio of 10 is heated by passing a c current to the heater placed under it.Theuniform heating is controlled using a digital temperature controller and a variac.The results of ribbed duct arecompared with the results of a smooth duct under the same experimental conditions.It is observed that the heattransfer augmentation in ribbed duct is better than that of the smooth duct.At Re=5.0×10~4,the meantemperature of air flowing through the ribbed duct increases by 2.45 percent over the smooth duct,whereas in theribbed duct Nusselt number increases by 15.14 percent than that of the smooth duct with a 6 percent increase inpressure drop.