Experimental Study of the Corrugation Profile Effect on the Local Heat Transfer Coefficient

This paper introduces an inverse study method applied to an experimental dataset of infrared temperature acquisitions to determine the local convective heat transfer coefficient of the turbulent flow inside a duct with corrugated surfaces. The study focuses on six tubes with different corrugation profiles: helical, transversal, and cross-helical. Previous research has shown that transversal corrugation generates the highest improvement in heat transfer performance, while helical corrugations are the easiest to manufacture. Consequently, the single helix solution is the preferred one in heat exchangers adopted in the food industry. A merger solution between them is represented by the cross-helix profile. The estimation process proposed in this study employs the external surface temperature of the tube, acquired with an infrared thermal camera, as starting data for the inverse heat conduction problem inside the pipe wall region. The calculation of its Laplacian was finally achieved by a filtering technique applied to the infrared temperature acquisitions.