Single-phase heat transfer in micro-tubes: A critical review

This review paper specifically concentrates on heat transfer in micro-tubes and eleven experiments (on liquid flow) and two experiments (on gaseous flow) from 1991 to 2007 are reviewed critically with respect to measurement techniques, instrumentation; and factors like surface roughness and diameter that may play an important role at these small scales. Moreover, a comprehensive list of numerical and analytical results (for both liquid and gaseous flows) is presented in this paper. Interestingly, the effect of surface roughness on heat transfer does not seem to have been investigated thoroughly, as it has been observed to play a key role in influencing heat transfer at small diameters. The state-of-art review thus provides the contemporary experimenters in the field of mini-micro channel heat transfer, this tabulated data that can be used to understand how the different parameters affect the heat transfer in these small scales and a data-bank to validate future numerical and experimental work. The present study identifies the various factors that have contributed in the disparity of results found in the literature and finds that there is a need to investigate certain issues like the effects of roughness, diameter, and secondary flow due to buoyancy on heat transfer and transition Moreover, it was observed that the start and end of the transition region at these small diameters are not validated by the any of the existing macro-scale correlations.