CONVECTION HEAT TRANSFER AROUND A SINGLE ROWOF CYLINDERS

The convection heat transfer around circular cylinders has been studied to be applied in heat exchangers, heaters, electronic circuits, and other thermal equipment. In these applications, it is necessary to analyze the influence of the heated cylinders in the fluid flow and vice versa. This paper presents a study about the Newtonian incompressible two-dimensional crossflow fluid around isothermal cylinders using the immersed boundary method (IBM) with the virtual physical model (VPM). The validation of the IBM-VPM homemade dynamic simulation code was performed for two particular cases. In case 1, the heat transfer effect in the flow around a group of three cylinders was studied in forced and mixed convection. In case 2, different numbers of cylinders were arranged in a single-row configuration with different distances between them. Navier-Stokes and energy equations were discretized using the finite difference method for space and a second-order Runge-Kutta method for time, and solved in a two-dimensional confined domain. Streamlines, isotherms, drag and lift coefficients, and Strouhal and Nusselt number are presented. The results confirmed the great influence of the distances between the cylinders over the aerodynamic coefficients and over the Nusselt number and the ability of the present numerical code to simulate flows over heated structures formed by any kind of immersed bodies.