Fluid flow characteristics of vascularized channel networks

Abstract

This paper reports the fluid flow characteristics of vascularized channel networks. To validate our vascular designs by ananalytical approach, three-dimensional numerical works were performed. The numerical work covered the Reynolds number range of 2-1000, cooling channels volume fraction of 0.02, pressure drop range of 10-10 000 Pa, and six flow configurations: first, second, and third constructal structures with optimized hydraulic diameters (D(1) and D(2)) and non-optimized hydraulic diameter (D) for each systemsize 10 x 10, 20 x 20 and 50 x 50, respectively. In these cases, the objective was to compare global flow resistance and mass flow rate distribution of the analytical solutions with those of numerical solutions subject to a fixed volume and a fixed pressure drop. This paper shows that the fluid flow performance of the second constructs is superior to that of the first and third constructs when the system size exceeds 20 x 20. The difference in flow resistance performance between the optimized and non-optimized structures was found to increase and manifests itself clearly as the system size increases. Results also reveal that flow uniformity become desirable with increasing the system size, and that the third construct configurations have better flow uniformity than the other architectures among the optimized and non-optimized channel configurations. The analytical results are also compared with numerical data and good agreement between the numerical and analytical results is found. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.