ASSESSMENT OF CONJUGATE AND CONVECTIVE HEAT TRANSFER PERFORMANCE OVER A PARTITIONED CHANNEL WITHIN BACKWARD-FACING STEP USING THE LATTICE BOLTZMANN METHOD

This research concerns the quality of heat transfer across a two-dimensional backwards-facing step in the presence of vertical or inclined partitions in a rectangular channel. Convective and conjugate heat transfer input using constant temperature and heat flux were successfully achieved for low Reynolds number values. The actual code based on the double multiple relaxation time of the lattice Boltzmann method was employed to model numerically the physical problems related to the fluid flow and heat transfer, where the obtained results had a good agreement with previous experimental research. During this study, parametric variations were carried out according to the inclination and position of the partitions, as well as the thermal conductivity ratio in the case of the conjugate heat transfer problem. The numerical results show that the involvement of the partitions and the thermal conductivity ratio has a significant effect on the fluid flow and heat transfer. This impact controls the evolution of local Nusselt number, bulk temperature, and skin friction coefficient. The improvement of heat transfer is remarkable by the introduction of vertical or inclined partitions such that the quality of heat exchange reaches about 7%. While the presence of two inclined partitions increases the heat transfer by about 6% in case of constant temperature of studied hot wall. The implementation of constant heat flux for the hot wall increases the quality of heat transfer by about 9%-10% by the presence of inclined or vertical walls, 11%-13% with double inclined partitions.