Roll No.

: 1210 5052 Assignment-1 (ME630) A Report on

Development of Finite Difference Solver for heat transfer analysis in fins

Guided by: Dr. P. S. Ghoshdastidar Professor MED, IITK Submitted by: Mistry Aashutosh N.

Department of Mechanical Engineering Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur 208 016 September 4th, 2012

ABSTRACT
Engineering applications in heat transfer demands devices with high heat transfer rates and small size. Extended surfaces are one of the most lucrative options to achieve those design goals. In this report a mathematical model is developed to quantify the heat exchange in fins. The same is solved using conventional analytical method and numerical technique. A finite difference solver is developed to determine temperature distribution inside a fin using Fortran 95. A sample problem is considered with three different fin materials aluminium, copper and stainless steel. The results of both the methods are in excellent agreement. The analysis of results shows that the material with higher thermal conductivity will the much more effective compared to materials with inferior conductivities. Also fin significantly enhances the heat transfer from a surface.

CONTENTS
Abstract Contents Nomenclature 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Introduction Mathematical Modeling Numerical Solution Grid Independence Test Analytical Solution Results and Discussion Conclusion Bibliography Appendices: Appendix A: Appendix B: Computer program Sample output 16 22 2 3 4 5 6 8 11 12 13 15 16

NOMENCLATURE
Roman Symbols: heat transfer rate (in W) film coefficient (in W/m2K) area (in m2) body temperature (in K) surrounding fluid temperature (in K) perimeter (in m) non-dimensional length (unitless) Biot number (unitless) Greek Symbols: non-dimensional temperature (unitless) fin effectiveness (unitless) fin efficiency (unitless)

1.

Introduction:

Heat transfer has been an integral part of human existence. Heat transfer applications range from day-to-day activities like cooking to cooling of computers, from automobile engine to power generation. Engineering applications of heat transfer relies heavily on Newtons law of cooling. (Eq. (1)) (1) where is heat transfer rate (in W), is the film coefficient (in W/m2K), is the area responsible for heat exchange (in m2) is body temperature (in K) is surrounding fluid temperature (in K)

Obviously one needs as high heat transfer rate as possible. For that equation (1) suggests three alternatives. 1. Increase film-coefficient: Film coefficient basically talks about the vigour of the convective heat transfer. It is a function of the flow parameters like Reynolds number, (forced convection) or Grashof number, (free convection) and fluid properties (mainly Prandtl number, ). 2. Decrease the fluid temperature: The body temperature is supposed to be constant. Then one way to enhance the heat transfer is by decreasing the free stream fluid temperature, . 3. Increase area of heat exchange If one increases the area over which heat exchange takes place, keeping other parameters constant, he would get increase in heat flux. Generally when one fixes the heat transfer fluid, he inevitable fixes the fluid properties. Then to increase film coefficient flow parameters needs to be altered. But in practical situations that is not so easy mainly because of higher pressure drops associated with the modified environment. Similarly, free stream temperature cannot be reduced beyond certain extent because of the reasons like higher heat losses to the external surroundings and other problems associated with the handling of the low temperature fluids. If heat exchange area is increased by making the devices larger it would not seems a good solution. Recent trend is towards miniaturization hence one would definitely wish to have higher heat transfer area with compact size. The best option to do so is by using extended surfaces (known as fins). A schematic diagram of the same is shown in the figure 1.

Figure 1: schematic diagram of a fin Fins locally increase the available area for heat transfer. Because of that heat exchange increases. Obviously addition of fins will cause more disturbances in the fluid flow and convection will slightly deteriorate. But it is more than compensated by increases area for heat transfer. Fins are extensively used in engineering practice from electronics cooling (figure 2) to devices like heat exchanges, electric motors etc. Mathematical modeling of the fins is presented in the next section. In this report a TDMA (tri diagonal matrix algorithm) based Finite Difference solver is developed. The numerical procedure for the same is presented in later sections and a sample problem is solved using the solver developed. For comparison the analytical solution for the same is also given. Fortran programming language is used for code development mainly because of its speed and ease of use. Recent version of Fortran - Fortran 95 is used. The developed computer code is given in the appendix for quick reference. A sample output is also given in the appendix. Figure 2: electronics cooling

2.

Mathematical Modeling:

Fins present quite an interesting mathematical problem. In fins heat is conducted in one direction and convected in the perpendicular direction. Again consider the figure 1. (This time in a slightly detailed manner.) An elemental volume of the fin is shown separately. From the figure it is quite clear that the heat transfer inside the fin (i.e. solid material) will be of conductive in nature while that from fin to the surroundings will be of convective in nature. If one assumes that the temperature at a cross-section of the fin is almost constant throughout,
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then the situation becomes simple. Because now one has conduction only in one direction. This assumption nicely reduces the computational domain to 1-D from 3-D. computational domain is shown in figure 3.

Figure 1: (revisited) Consider figure 3. It depicts a 1-D fin with base temperature, placed in a convective environment defined by film coefficient, and free stream temperature, .

Now for mathematical analysis consider a small element situated between two planes at and respectively. According to Fouriers law of conduction, heat input at is given by:

| Then using Taylors series expansion around point heat output from the elemental can be written as: |

Figure 3: computational domain volume by conduction at

Also heat transfer by convection form surface (given by Newtons law of cooling) is: where is perimeter of the cross section at .

Hence applying the First law of Thermodynamics (assuming that no heat is stored to change the internal energy and no work is done),

) (2)

where it is assumed that the cross-sectional area and perimeter are constant and does not vary with . Equation (2) is the governing differential equation for steady state fin problem. Further analysis (both numerical and analytical) will be shown with the help of an example. Consider a case of a rectangular fin (dimensions ) with base temperature, . The surrounding fluid temperature is . Convective coefficient is and heat transfer coefficient from tip (end convection) is . It is desired to find steady state temperature distribution in the fin. Here the boundary conditions can be enumerated as below: Left end: at Right end: at | The first boundary is mathematically known as the Dirichlet boundary conditions and the second is known as the Robins boundary condition. To generalize the analysis for various materials and geometric parameters, the governing equation given above can be easily non-dimensionalised. Consider the following scheme of non-dimensionalization. . Then the equation (2) will condense to: and (3) where

In the same non-dimensionalization scheme, the boundary conditions will reduce to: Left end: and Right end: |

3.

Numerical Solution:

This section presents a numerical procedure for solving the governing equation developed in the section 2. A careful look at the governing equation reveals that the governing equation is linear with constant coefficients. The domain itself is quite simple (1-D in nature). Hence very simple numerical method should suffice to solve the problem. Keeping in view these subtle points, finite difference method is opted for as the method of discretization. Finite difference method basically relies on the Taylor series expansion of differential terms in the governing equation.
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The computational domain is discretized as shown in the figure 4 with total M points along the length of the fin. Here is the spacing between two consecutive grid-points.

For uniform grid spacings,

Figure 4: Discretized domain

and first and second derivatives of any function, can be approximated as follows:

and

Using this scheme of discretization, the non-dimensional governing differential equation can be discretized as:

or, (4) This equation would work nicely for any interior point, . But for boundary points i.e. for points 1 and M, one does not have a point with index 0 or a point with index (M+1). For that reason treatment of the boundary is a bit involved. Left Boudnary: This boundary is given explicitly as, Hence one need not solve any equation for the first point and this information can be directly utilized while solving for point 2. For point 2 the discretized form of the equation will be: In this representation all the unknowns are on the left hand side.

Right Boundary: This is a bit more complicated boundary. The discretized equation for M th in the form given by equation (4) will be: Here one does not have explicit information about the point (M+1). The prescribed boundary conditions is: |

or,
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Substituting this relation in equation (4): ( )

Here (M+1)th point is actually not present in the physical domain. It is call an image point and the method is called an image-point technique. Thus the final set of governing equations can be given as below: ( and for all other points )

(5)

Matrix algorithm: The set of equations (5) can be re-written in the matrix format as:

(6) ( )] [ ] [ ]

It is basically a tri-diagonal matrix i.e. for which all the entries other than on three diagonals are zero. It can be symbolically represented as:

(7) [ ][ ] [ ]

Tri-diagonal matrix algorithm (TDMA) provides a very elegant method for solving this set of equations. This method requires on an average 3N steps for a system of N which is quite less compared to other methods. In this method every solution is expressed in the form:

where new constants

and

are calculated using the following correlations.

Starting values are

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A general purpose program is written in the Fortran programming language to perform the numerical computations. The details of the same are presented in Appendix A and a sample output is given in the Appendix B.

4.

Grid Independence Test:

At the heart of the Finite Difference approximations is the concept of truncated Taylor series expansion. It is expanded in terms of the powers of i.e. step size. So for different values of truncation error changes appreciably. Now the physical phenomenon must have a unique solution. In other words there should not be a grid-size dependent solution. To ensure that the solution behaves well, a test is performed known as the grid independence test. In this test different solutions are generated for the same problem by only varying the grid size. These generated solutions are then graphically compared and the least number of grid spacing out of all the grid spacings for which the solution does not change is taken up for further computations. In the absence of pure analytic solutions, grid independence test is probably the only method to ensure correct results (physically realistic).

Figure 5: grid test for aluminium as fin material

Figure 6: grid test for copper as fin material

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Figure 5, 6 and 7 present the grid independence tests for three materials, namely aluminium ( , copper and stainless steel ( for the sample fin problem described previously. From the figures it is clear that one indeed get the grid spacing for which the solution is grid independent. For aluminium and copper the curves for the temperature distribution basically coincides for various number of grid points, N=10, N=20, N=40 and N=80. Hence either of these grids can be chosen. Here N=20 grid is selected for aluminium and copper in the further analysis mainly to get sufficient number of points for any

Figure 7: grid test for stainless steel as fin material post processing.

Similarly for stainless steel fin, figure 7 expresses that solutions overlap for higher grids N=40 and N=80. N=40 grid is taken up for stainless steel fin.

5.

Analytical Solution:

The governing equation for fin problem was derived in section 2.

It is basically a linear, ordinary differential equation with constant coefficients. Hence it may have an analytical solution. It is apparent that the roots of the characteristic equation are

So, the form of the general solution will be: where and are arbitrary constants. :

On the left boundary i.e. at

On the right boundary i.e. at calculations, one gets, { {{ Substituting the same in

| } } one would get {

. After simple mathematical

}}

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{ {{ Thus the analytical solution is: } {

} }}

(8) where { {{ } { {{ } { { } }} } }}

6.

Results and Discussion:

The developed finite difference solver is used to generate results for the three materials considered previously aluminium, copper and stainless steel. The optimum gird spacing as determined previously is used for the computations. The resulting temperature profiles are shown in figure 8, 9 and 10. Here solid lines represent the temperature profile as per the analytical relationship developed in the section 5 while squares give the temperature found using the numerical method. It is quite clear that the results are in excellent agreement. Figure 11 compares the three materials simultaneously.

Figure 8: temperature profile for aluminium

Figure 9: temperature profile for copper

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Detailed study of figure 11 reveals that the temperature drop is the least for copper (highest conductivity among the three materials) and maximum for stainless steel (lowest conductivity among the three materials) for the same length of the fin. This fact is even corroborated by the Biot number. Biot number is defined as: Hence higher is the thermal conductivity, the less will be the importance of the internal conduction in solid. In other words lesser would be the temperature drop. This fact is corroborated by the analysis presented here. Figure 10: temperature profile for stainless steel In analysis of fin other parameters of interest are heat loss, , fin effectiveness, and fin efficiency, . Their values are presented in table 1. These values are calculated using both the numerically obtained temeprature profile and analytical equation. In the table N denotes the numerical answers and A the analytical results. Fin heat loss, is the total amount of heat exchagned by fin with the surroundings. | Figure 11: comparison of temperature profiles Table 1: Fin parameters Aluminium N A Heat loss, (W/m2) Fin effectiven ess, Fin efficiency, 424934.19 75.54 425404.62 75.62 Copper N 471384.91 83.80 A 471718.82 83.86 Stainless steel N A 137453.80 24.44 137974.92 24.54

74.94 %

75.02 %

83.14 %

83.20 %

24.24 %

24.33 %

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Numerically this term wold be, ( And analytically (using equation (8)), )

Fin effectiveness is defined as:

Fin efficiency is given by:

For a given fin maximum heat loss will occur when entire fin is at the same temperature, the base temperature. Hence,

Obviously the higher is the thermal conductivity of a given fin, more even would be the temperature and more will be the efficiency value. According to this logic, copper with the highest conductivity among the three materials considered should have the highest fin efficiency. The same fact is confirmed by the results produced in table 1. It is also clear form the table 1 that the numerical and analytical results are in outstanding agreement. For practical purposes a fin is only used when effectiveness is greater than 2 for the given conditions.

7.

Conclusion:

In this report fins a concept of significant practical interest is considered. Heat transfer analysis is performed using both numerical procedure and analytical method. It can be concluded that the finite difference solver developed here gives very good results almost the same as the analytical results. The higher is the conductivity of the fin material, more uniform will be the temperature and better will be the fin performance. Fin effectiveness is quote greater than one which signifies that fin is highly effective in heat transfer enhancement form a given surface. A more detailed analysis of fins would need one to consider the effect of fins on the fluid flow and resulting convective heat transfer.
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Bibliography
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Muralidhar, K, Banerjee, J., Conduction and Radiation, Narosa Publishing House, New Delhi, India, 2010 Ghoshdastidar, P.S., Computer Simulation of Flow and Heat Transfer, Tata McGraw-Hill, New Delhi, 1998 Incropera, Dewitt, et al., Fundamentals of Heat and Mass Transfer, 6e Lienhard, J., H., IV, et al., A Heat Transfer Textbook, 3e, Phlogison Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2008 Chapman, S. J., Fortran 90/95 for Scientists and Engineers, 1e, WCB/ McGraw Hill, 1998

Appendices
Appendix A: Computer Program

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Appendix B: Sample Output ---------------------------------------Enter the values in the SI unit system

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---------------------------------------Enter the base temeprature of the fin: 250.000 Enter the temperature of the surrounding fluid: 25.0000 Enter the conductivity of the fin material: 237.000 Enter the heat transfer coefficient of the surroundings: 25.0000 Enter the heat transfer coefficient at the tip of fin: 10.0000 Enter the length of the fin: 0.100000 Enter the width of the fin: 0.500000 Enter the thickness of the fin: 2.000000E-03 Enter the number of grid points along the fin axis: 5 Grid spacings i.e. space step will be Perimeter will be Cross-sectional area will be Value of the parameter mL will be C1 = 0.1124 C2 = 0.8876 : : : : 0.2500 1.0040 0.0010 1.0291

Distance(m) 0.00 0.03 0.05 0.08 0.10

TEMPERATURE VARIATION --------------------Temperature(C) Analytical(C) 250.00 250.00 212.27 212.12 186.93 186.69 172.32 172.02 167.45 167.14 : : :

Heat flux due to fin per unit base area is 416442.59 W/m2 Heat transfer without fin would be 5625.00 W/m2 Maximum possible heat transfer with fin would be 566999.94 W/m2 Fin effectiveness is Fin efficiency is : 74.03 : 73.45 %

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