Graduation date: 1938

Typescript. / Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii, 1970. / Bibliography: leaves 207-211. / [15], 211 l illus., maps, tables

Thesis (MTech (Mechanical Engineering))--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2016. / The performance of a wall Mounted space comfort heater has been studied with respect to the geometry of its mounting condition. Tests were conducted in a laboratory with the heater positioned at various heights from the floor and the channel that is created by the various gaps with the wall on which the heater was mounted. Tests were also performed with the heater mounted on the wall whose emissivity was adjusted to low, medium and high values as well as placing insulation material on the wall directly behind the heater. The outcome of the experiments revealed an acceptable geometry of the heater’s mounting at least 200 mm above the floor, and 50 mm off-set from the wall. The results of the heater mounted against the wall revealed a drop in performance as compared to the heater’s “benchmark” performance when it was freely standing on the floor of the laboratory; with an efficiency of about 41% (almost evenly shared by each face). This efficiency, which is based on the convective heat transfer generated by the heater’s warm/hot surfaces, is relative to the electrical energy input and it dropped when the heater was mounted against a grey wall to around 35%, of which only 26% was produced inside the channel. The heat transfer by radiation from the heater’s surface is treated as net loss to the walls of the room/enclosure.The performance of the heater when mounted against the wall improved almost to the benchmark value when the wall behind the heater was made refelective (low emissivity). It is recommended that further research should be undertaken to thoroughly investigate the “mode” of heat transfer, by the induced flow through the channel, in a more formal or scientific modelling approach.

The study of two phase flow, where a finely divided solid is suspended in a fluid medium, has received considerable attention in the last five years due to the increased number of systems in which this phenomena occurs. The two most important areas involving the gas- particle mechanism are nuclear reactor heat exchangers and liquid and solid rockets.

No description available.

No description available.

Thesis. 1976. Sc.D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Chemical Engineering. / Microfiche copy available in Archives and Science. / Bibliography: leaves 225-237. / Sc.D.

Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

This work offers new computational methods for the optimal control of the conjugate heat transfer (CHT) problem in thermal science. Conjugate heat transfer has many important industrial applications, such as heat exchange processes in power plants and cooling in electronic packaging industry, and has been a staple of computational methods in thermal science for many years. This work considers the Dirichlet boundary control of fluid-solid CHT problems. The CHT system falls into the category of multi-physics problems. Its domain typically consists of two parts, namely, a solid region subject to thermal heating or cooling and a conjugate fluid region responsible for thermal convection transport. These two different physical systems are strongly coupled through the thermal boundary condition at the fluid-solid interface. The objective in the CHT boundary control problem is to select optimally the fluid inflow profile that minimizes an objective function that involves the sum of the mismatch between the temperature distribution in the system and a prescribed temperature profile and the cost of the control. This objective is realized by minimizing a nonlinear objective function of the boundary control and the fluid temperature variables, subject to partial differential equations (PDE) constraints governed by the coupled heat diffusion equation in the solid region and mass, momentum and energy conservation equations in the fluid region. Although CHT has received extensive attention as a forward problem, the optimal Dirichlet velocity boundary control for the coupled CHT process to our knowledge is only very sparsely studied analytically or computationally in the literature [131]. Therefore, in Part I, we describe the formulation of the optimal control problem and introduce the building blocks for the finite element modeling of the CHT problem, namely, the diffusion equation for the solid temperature, the convection-diffusion equation for the fluid temperature, the incompressible viscous Navier-Stokes equations for the fluid velocity and pressure, and the model verification of CHT simulations. In Part II, we provide theoretical analysis to explain the nonsmoothness issue which has been observed in this study and in Dirichlet boundary control of Navier-Stokes flows by other scientists. Based on these findings, we use either explicit or implicit numerical smoothing to resolve the nonsmoothness issue. Moreover, we use the numerical continuation on regularization parameters to alleviate the difficulty of locating the global minimum in one shot for highly nonlinear optimization problems even when the initial guess is far from optimal. Two suites of numerical experiments have been provided to demonstrate the feasibility, effectiveness and robustness of the optimization scheme. In Part III, we demonstrate the strategy of achieving parallel scalable algorithms for CHT models in Simulations of Reactor Thermal Hydraulics. Our motivation originates from the observation that parallel processing is necessary for optimal control problems of very large scale, when the simulation of the underlying physics (or PDE constraints) involves millions or billions of degrees of freedom. To achieve the overall scalability of optimal control problems governed by PDE constraints, scalable components that resolve the PDE constraints and their adjoints are the key. In this Part, first we provide the strategy of designing parallel scalable solvers for each building blocks of the CHT modeling, namely, for the discrete diffusive operator, the discrete convection-diffusion operator, and the discrete Navier-Stokes operator. Second, we demonstrate a pair of effective, robust, parallel, and scalable solvers built with collaborators for simulations of reactor thermal hydraulics. Finally, in the the section of future work, we outline the roadmap of parallel and scalable solutions for Dirichlet boundary control of fluid-solid conjugate heat transfer processes.

A constrained thin film desorption scheme has been experimentally tested to determine the desorption rates for water from an aqueous lithium bromide mixture through a confining membrane. Variable conditions include the inlet concentration, pressure differential across the membrane, and channel height. Desorption takes place in a channel created between two parallel plates with one of the walls being both heated and porous. A hydrophobic porous membrane creates a liquid-vapor interface and allows for vapor removal from the channel. Inlet concentrations of 32 wt%, 40 wt%, and 50 wt% lithium bromide were tested at an inlet sub-atmospheric pressure of 33.5 kPa. Pressure differentials across the membrane of 6 kPa and 12 kPa were imposed along with two channel heights of 170 μm and 745 μm. All cases were run at an inlet mass flow rate of 3.2 g/min, corresponding to Reynolds numbers of approximately 2.5 to 4.5. The membrane surface area for desorption was 16.8 cm². A maximum desorption rate (vapor mass flow rate) of 0.51 g/min was achieved, for the 32 wt%, 12 kPa pressure differential, and 170 μm channel. Increasing the pressure differential across the channel allowed for higher desorption rates at a fixed wall superheat, and delayed the transition to boiling. As the inlet concentration increased the desorber's performance decreased as more energy was required to produce a fixed desorption rate. Results are also presented for the variation in the heat transfer coefficient with the wall superheat temperature. The increase in the channel height had a negative influence on the heat transfer coefficient, requiring larger superheat values to produce a fixed desorption rate. / Graduation date: 2005 / Best scan available for tables and computer code in the appendices. The original is faded.