Numerical and experimental study of the forced convection heat transfer for a circular cylinder

In this paper, numerical simulation and experimental validation were performed to study the forced convection process for an insulated copper tube. The experiment enabled the determination of the temperature distribution inside the tube, at the internal and external face of the thermal insulation. The system was simulated using the commercial CFD software ANSYS Fluent, based on the resolution of the Navier–Stokes equations in conjunction with the \(k-\epsilon\) $k-ϵ$ turbulence model. The numerical model has shown its ability to correctly predict the convection process and a good agreement between numerical and experimental results was obtained in terms of temperature distribution and convective heat transfer coefficients. This coefficient was also calculated with the empirical model of Sieder and Tate and compared to numerical and experimental data.