Heat transfer behavior including thermal wake effects in forced air cooling of arrays of rectangular blocks

Abstract

Experiments have been carried out to study thermal wake effects in arrays of rectangular blocks encountered in electronic equipment. Data were obtained for a series of channel heights and flow velocities. The temperature rise due to wake effects behind a single heated module was found to be fairly independent of the channel height and the position of the heated block, for a given approach velocity. The adiabatic temperature rise data for a module due to a heated element immediately upstream of it for different inter-module spacings were found to correlate well in terms of a new parameter called the surface packing density. It was reported by the authors in an earlier paper that both the adiabatic heat transfer coefficient and pressure-drop data for regular in-line arrays correlated well in terms of a composite geometric parameter called the volume packing density. These experiments have been extended to a higher Reynolds number. Empirical correlations are presented here for friction factor and Nusselt number in terms of the volume packing density, and for the thermal wake effects in terms of the surface packing density. Data from literature for arrays with widely different geometric parameters are shown to agree with these correlations.