Numerical simulation and experimental verification of the steady-state heat transfer similarity theory based on dimensional analysis

Abstract

The core idea of similarity theory is to use the scaled model to replace prototype for equivalent experiments, to obtain approximate solutions to the research problems based on saving research costs. The major goal of this work is to propose a new steady-state heat transfer similarity theory based on dimensional analysis and construct a heat transfer model that can be used for low-speed, small-scale target heat transfer experiments. This theory comprehensively considers geometric similarity, flow similarity, heat transfer similarity and optical similarity, providing an innovative theoretical basis for heat transfer shrinkage experiments. In addition, it has higher applicability and scalability when facing complex heat transfer experiments. The results showed that, Although the experiments in this article have certain environmental errors and systematic errors, the theory and model still show extremely high heat transfer prediction accuracy in numerical simulations and experiments. The maximum value of the intra-group relative temperature errors during numerical simulation does not even exceed 1 % and the mean value is within 0.5 %.

Keywords

• Dimensional analysis
• Experiment
• Heat transfer
• Similarity theory
• Scaled model
• Simulation