Flow Characteristics and Its Impact on Heat Transfer in Microchannel with Porous Rectangular Vortex Generator

This paper investigates the hydrothermal performance of microchannel augmented with porous vortex generators using numerical simulation. The geometry of the vortex generators is varied to analyse its effect on the heat transfer, pressure drop and overall performance of the microchannel. The numerical model was validated with experimental data. The result shows that the porous longitudinal vortex generator (VG) equipped microchannel can significantly augment heat transfer rate as compared to a plain microchannel. Also, an increased number of porous VGs can yield a better performance (by 5.75%) in comparison to a solid VG equipped microchannel. A maximum heat transfer enhancement in porous vortex generator equipped microchannel heat sink with of Darcy number 10–3 of 30.6% at angle of α = 45° is observed over plain walled microchannel heat sink for flow with Re = 103. The maximum overall performance value for every considered case in this study is found as 1.306 for porous vortex generator, and 1.235 for solid vortex generator equipped microchannel.