Flow and heat transfer in non-circular passages

Passage flows represent one of the fundamental problems encountered in the design and development of engineering and other equipment. The present study has the objective to provide an introduction to the calculation of passage flows with and without heat transfer, starting with the initial case of fully-developed laminar flow in straight noncircular passages. A finite-difference method for fully developed flow in arbitrarily shaped passages is developed and used to calculate laminar and turbulent flow and heat transfer in square, rectangular, elliptical, and rod bundle passages. The laminar flow and heat transfer calculations are found to be in excellent agreement with the existing available analytical solutions and previous numerical solutions, confirming the accuracy and flexibility of the orthogonal curvilinear mesh based method.