Detached Eddy Simulations (DES) is a hybrid URANS-LES technique that was proposed to obtain computationally feasible solutions of high Reynolds number flows undergoing massive separation with reliable accuracy. Since its inception, DES has been applied to a wide variety of flow fields, but mostly limited to unbounded external aerodynamic flows. This is the first study to apply and validate DES to predict the internal flow and heat transfer in non-canonical flows of industrial relevance. The prediction capabilities of DES in capturing the effects of Coriolis forces, which are induced by rotation, and centrifugal buoyancy forces, which are induced by thermal gradients, are also authenticated. The accurate prediction of turbulent flows is sensitive to the level of turbulence predicted by the turbulence scheme. By treating the regions of interest in LES mode, DES allows the unsteadiness in these regions to develop and hence predicts the turbulence levels accurately. Additionally, this permits DES to capture the effects of system rotation and buoyancy. Computations on a rotating system (a sudden expansion duct) and a system subjected to thermal gradients (cavity with a heated wall) validate the prediction capability of DES. The application of DES is further extended to a non-canonical, internal flow which is of relevance in internal cooling of gas turbine blades. Computations of the fully developed flow and heat transfer shows that DES surpasses several shortcomings of the RANS model on which it is based. DES accurately predicts the primary and secondary flow features, the turbulence characteristics and the heat transfer in stationary ducts and in rotating ducts, where the effects of Coriolis forces and centrifugal buoyancy forces are dominant. DES computations are carried out at a computational cost that is almost an order of magnitude less than the LES with little compromise on the accuracy. However, the capabilities of DES in predicting the transition to turbulence are inadequate, as highlighted by the flow features and the heat transfer in the developing region of the duct. But once the flow becomes fully turbulent, DES predicts the flow physics and shows good quantitative agreement with the experiments and LES. / Ph. D.

Large-Eddy Simulations (LES or wall-resolved LES, WRLES) has been used extensively in capturing the physics of anisotropic turbulent flows. However, near wall turbulent scales in the inner layer in wall bounded flows makes it unfeasible for large Reynolds numbers due to grid requirements. This study evaluates the use of a wall model for LES (WMLES) on a channel with rotation at ã Reã _b = 34,000 from ã Roã _b = 0 to 0.38, non-staggered 90° ribbed duct with rotation at ã Reã _b = 20,000 from ã Roã _b = 0 to 0.70, stationary 45° staggered ribbed duct at ã Reã _b = 49,000, and two-pass smooth duct with a U-bend at ã Reã _b = 25,000 for ã Roã _b = 0 to 0.238 against WRLES and experimental data. In addition, for the two-pass smooth duct with a U-bend simulations, the synthetic eddy method (SEM) is used to artificially generate eddies at the inlet based on given flow characteristics. It is presented that WMLES captures the effects of Coriolis forces and predicts mean heat transfer augmentation ratios reasonably well for all simulations. The alleviated grid resolution for these simulations indicates significant reductions in resources, specifically, by a factor of 10-20 in non-staggered 90° ribbed duct simulations. The combined effects of density ratio, Coriolis forces, with SEM for the inlet turbulence, capture the general trends in heat transfer in and after the bend. / Master of Science

The demand for more power and performance from electronic equipment has constantly been growing resulting in an increased amount of heat dissipation from these devices. Thermal management of high-density power control units for hybrid electric vehicles is one such application. Over the last few years, the performance of this power control unit has been improved and size has been reduced to attain higher efficiency and performance causing the heat dissipation as well as heat density to increase significantly. However, the overall cooling system has remained unchanged and only the heat exchanger corresponding to the power control unit (PCU) has been improved. This has allowed the manufacturing costs to go down. Efforts are constantly being made to reduce the PCU size even further and also to reduce manufacturing costs. As a consequence, heat density will go up (~ 200 – 250 W/cm2) and thus, a better high performance cooler/heat exchanger is required that can operate under the existing cooling system design and at the same time, maintain active devices temperature within optimum range (<120 – 125 °C) for higher reliability. The aim of this dissertation was to study the various cooling options based on jet impingement, mini-channel, ribbed mini-channel, phase change material and double sided cooling configurations for application in hybrid electric vehicle and other similar consumer products and perform parametric and optimization study on selected designs. Detailed experimental and computational analysis was performed on different cooling designs to evaluate overall performance. Severe constraints such as choice of coolant, coolant flow-rate, pressure drop, minimum geometrical size and operating temperature were required for the overall design. High performance jet impingement based cooler design with incorporated fin-like structures induced swirl and provided enhanced local heat transfer compared to traditional cooling designs. However, the cooling scheme could manage only 97.4% of the target effectiveness. Tapered/nozzle-shaped jets based designs showed promising results (~40% reduction in overall pressure drop) but were not sufficient to meet the overall operating temperature requirement. Various schemes of mini-channel arrangement, which were based on utilizing conduction and convection heat transfer in a conjugate mode, demonstrated improved performance over that of impingement cooling schemes. Impingement and mini-channel based designs were combined to show high heat transfer rates but at the expense of higher pressure drops (~5 times). As an alternate, mini-channel based coolers with ~1.5 mm size channels having trip strips or ribs were studied to accommodate the design constraints and to enhance local as well as overall heat transfer rates and achieve the target operating temperature. A step by step approach to the development of the heat exchanger is provided with an emphasis on system level design. The computational based optimization methodology is confirmed by a fabricated test bed to evaluate overall performance and compare the predicted results with actual performance. Additionally, one of the impingement based configuration (Swirl-Impingement-Fin) developed during the course of this work was applied to the internal cooling of a turbine blade trailing edge and was shown to enhance the thermal performance by at least a factor of 2 in comparison to the existing pin-fin technology for the conditions studied in this work. / Ph. D.