Numerical investigation on the performance of a honeycomb-shaped channel

A certain number of researches have been implemented on the fluid flow and heat transfer in fractal-like channels for their excellent heat transfer performance, which can be attributed to the effects of the bifurcations causing diffluence flow and confluence flow on thinning thermal boundary layer and inducing secondary flow. In this paper, the three-dimensional numerical models of the honeycomb-shaped minichannels were established to research the effects of branching angles on the hydrodynamic and thermal characteristics in the case of laminar flow. A comparative study was carried out to evaluate the performance of the current structures with the straight minichannel based on approximately the same hydraulic diameter, heat flux density and convective heat transfer area. In the simulation results the superiority of overall performance of the honeycomb-shaped minichannels over the straight minichannel was discovered. In addition, the studies showed that the honeycomb-shaped minichannel with smaller branching angle attained the higher overall performance within the relatively high Reynolds number range. It was found that the honeycomb-shaped minichannel with branching angle of 60° yields the best overall performance at the Reynolds number of 400.