Microchannels pressure drop

Pressure Drop and Visualization of Flow Patterns To analyze flow boiling instabilities in a minichannel or a microchannel, pressure measurements recorded at a high frequency (e.g., 200 Hz) are usually performed. The analysis of the microchannel pressure drop is then related to flow patterns to understand destabilization mechanisms. 

Friction factor in microchannels Pressure drop in microchannels Transition in microchannels... 

Sobhan CB, Garimella SV (2001) A comparative analysis of studies on heat transfer and fluid flow in micro-channels. Microscale Thermophys Eng 5 293-311 Steinke M, Kandlikar SG (2003) Flow boiling and pressure drop in parallel flow micro-channels. In Kandlikar SG (ed) Proceedings of 1st International Conference on Micro-channels and Mini-channels, Rochester, 24-25 April 2003, pp 567-579 Thome JR (2006) State-of-the-art overview of boiling and two-phase flows in microchannels. Heat Transfer Eng 27(9) 4-19... 

The data on pressure drop in irregular channels are presented by Shah and London (1978) and White (1994). Analytical solutions for the drag in micro-channels with a wide variety of shapes of the duct cross-section were obtained by Ma and Peterson (1997). Numerical values of the Poiseuille number for irregular microchannels are tabulated by Sharp et al. (2001). It is possible to formulate the general features of Poiseuille flow as follows ... 

Judy J, Maynes D, Webb BW (2002) Characterization of frictional pressure drop for liquid flows through micro-channels. Int J Heat Mass Transfer 45 3477-3489 Kandlikar SG, Joshi S, Tian S (2003) Effect of surface roughness on heat transfer and fluid flow characteristics at low Reynolds numbers in small diameter tubes. Heat Transfer Eng 24 4-16 Koo J, Kleinstreuer C (2004) Viscous dissipation effects in microtubes and microchannels. Int J Heat Mass Transfer 47 3159-3169... 

Ozawa M, Akagawa K, Sakaguchi T, Tsukahara T, Fuji T (1979) Oscillatory flow instabilities in air-water two-phase flow systems. Report. Pressure drop oscillation. Bull JSME 22 1763-1770 Qu W, Yoon S-M, Mudawar 1 (2004) Two-phase flow and heat transfer in rectangular microchannels. J Electron Packag 126 288-300... 

Taitel Y, Bamea D, Dukler AE (1980) Modeling flow pattern transitions for steady upward gas-liquid flow in vertical tubes. AlChE J 26 345-354 Triplett KA, Ghiaasiaan SM, Adbel-Khalik SI, Sadowski DL (1999a) Gas-liquid two-phase flow in microchannels. Part 1 two-phase flow patterns. Int J Multiphase Flow 25 377-394 Triplett KA, Ghiaasiaan SM, Abdel-Khalik SI, LeMouel A, McCord BN (1999b) Gas-liquid two-phase flow in microchannels. Part 11 void fraction and pressure drop. Int J Multiphase Flow 25 395 10... 

The subject of Chap. 6 is boiling in micro-channels. Several aspects of boiling are also considered for conventional size channels and comparison with micro-channels was carried out. Significant differences of ONB in micro-channels have been discussed compared to conventional channels. Effect of dissolved gases on boiling in water and surfactant solution was revealed. Attention was paid on pressure drop and heat transfer, critical heat flux and instabilities during flow boiling in microchannels. 

The measurements show that the pressure drop in circular and rectangular microchannels depend strongly on the mass and heat fluxes (Tran et al. 2000 Yu et al. 2002 Shuai et al. 2003). 

Four elements of microchannel scale-up models will be described pressure-drop design, heat-transfer design, reactor design, and mechanical and manufacturing designs. 

Numbering up microchannels to large-scale capacity reactors is driven by a rigorous understanding of pressure drop in every parallel circuit Passive flow distribution permits sufficient flow to each channel. No serious evaluation of microvalves or actuators has been undertaken for high-capacity systems with thousands to tens... 

As described above, microchannel reactor scale-up requires integrated models, which include the reaction chemistry with heat transfer, pressure drop, flow distribution, and manufacturing tolerances. The culmination of scale-up models is their successful demonstration. 

We prepared microchannel reactor employing stainless steel sheet 400tan thick patterned microchannel by a wet chemical etching. The microchannel shape and dimension were decided by computer simulation of flow distribution and pressure drop of the reactants in the microchaimel sheet. Two different types of patterned plates with mirror image were prepared [5]. The plate has 21 straight microchannels which are 550/an wide, 230/an deep and 34mi long as revealed in Fig. 1(b). 

Chen, Y., Chen, P., Heat transfer and pressure drop in fractal tree-like microchannel nets, Int. J. Heat Mass Transfer 45 (2002) 2643-2648. 

Taking into account typical numbers for a and D, this underlines that the channel width should be considerably smaller than 1 mm (1000 pm) in order to achieve short residence times. Actually, heat exchangers of such small dimensions are not completely new, because liquid cooled microchannel heat sinks for electronic applications allowing heat fluxes of 790 watts/cm2 were already known in 1981 [46]. About 9 years later a 1 cm3 cross flow heat exchanger with a high aspect ratio and channel widths between 80 and 100 pm was fabricated by KFK [10, 47]. The overall heat transport for this system was reported to be 20 kW. This concept of multiple, parallel channels of short length to obtain small pressure drops has also been realized by other workers, e.g. by PNNL and IMM. IMM has reported a counter-current flow heat exchanger with heat transfer coefficients of up to 2.4 kW/m2 K [45] (see Fig. 3). 

Qu et al. [37, 38] performed an experimental investigation on pressure drop and heat transfer of water in trapezoidal silicon microchannels with a hydraulic diameters ranging from 62 to 169 pm. They also carried out a numerical analysis by solving a conjugate heat transfer problem involving simultaneous determination of the temperature field in both the solid and the fluid regions. They found that the experimentally determined Nusselt... 

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