Augmentation of natural convective heat transfer by acoustic cavitation

Abstract

An experimental study was conducted to investigate the effects of acoustic cavitation on natural convective heat transfer from a horizontal circular tube. The experimental results indicated that heat transfer could be enhanced by acoustic cavitation and had the best effect when the head of the ultrasonic transducer was over the midpoint of the circular tube, and the distance between the head and the tube equaled 15 mm. The augmentation at low heat flux was better than that in the case of high heat flux. Based on experimental results, the correlation formula of Nusselt number for water was obtained.

Keywords

heat transfer enhancement / augmentation / acoustic cavitation / acoustic streaming / convective heat transfer