Hou-Kuan Tam
Department of Electromechanical Engineering, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Macau, Macau SAR, China
Yu-Xiang Xu
Department of Electromechanical Engineering, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Macau, Macau SAR, China
Lap-Mou Tam
Department of Electromechanical Engineering, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Macau, Taipa, Macau, China; Institute for the Development and Quality, Macau SAR, China
Afshin J. Ghajar
School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK 74078, USA
Under the heating condition, it is of interest to see whether the friction factor characteristics in mini-tubes are the same as those of macro-tubes, especially, in the complicated transition region. Therefore, an experimental setup was built for this study to measure the mini-tube pressure drop (friction factor) under the uniform wall heat flux boundary condition. In this study, the fully developed pressure drops were measured
in a test section fitted with horizontal mini-tubes of 4 mm and 2 mm inner diameters. A straight tube length was used as the inlet configuration. The entire experiment covered the Reynolds number range between 1000 and 5000 (laminar-transition-turbulent regions). For the friction factor results, heating caused a decrease in the laminar and transitional friction factors and higher heat flux applied to the mini-tube delayed the start and end of the transition region. For both diameters, the friction factor data were reasonably predicted by the
classical macro-scale correlations in the laminar, transition, and turbulent regions.