Flow and Heat Transfer Characteristics of Confined Noncircular Turbulent Impinging Jets

A three dimensional computational fluid dynamic investigation is carried out to predict the turbulent flow and surface heat transfer under an impinging air jet issuing normally from a single noncircular orifice in a plate held parallel to the target surface. Static pressure distributions, velocity fields and local as well as average Nusselt number on the impinged surface are presented for square, elliptic, and rectangular orifices and compared with those for a circular orifice. Effects of jet Reynolds number as well as spacing between the nozzle plate and the impinged surface are examined using a two-layer κ-η turbulence model. Results show flow structure similarities between the characteristics of rectangular and elliptic jets of equal aspect ratio. Further, it is observed that noncircular impinging jets can provide higher average heat transfer rates than corresponding circular jets for certain geometric parameters viz. nozzle-to-plate spacing and the size of the averaging area used to compute the average Nusselt number.