Selection of Optimum Heat Flux Distribution in Pipe Flow Under Laminar Forced Convection

The concept of non-uniform heat flux distributions has emerged because of its potential to make the design of thermal systems more flexible. Therefore, the current study highlights the impact of non-uniform heat flux distributions on the thermal characteristics of a high Prandtl number fluid for forced convective laminar flow regime in a horizontal pipe. The steady-state 2-D simulations have been employed using ANSYS Fluent. The variations in heat flux distributions as a wall boundary condition are systematically analyzed while keeping the total heat transfer constant. The results obtained for various distributions are compared in terms of a dimensionless maximum wall temperature (hot spot), local and average Nusselt numbers, and entropy generation rate. The analysis showed that the heat flux distributions significantly affected the heat transfer pattern. It was found that the hot spot temperature was lower for the descending heat flux boundary conditions compared to the ascending type of distributions. However, a higher entropy generation rate was observed for descending distributions as compared to ascending ones. It was also found that the ascending heat flux distributions provided higher average Nusselt number values than the descending cases of heat flux.