Laminar Heat Transfer in Rotating Eccentric Annuli

The paper presents numerical solutions to the problem of laminar heat transfer in eccentric annuli with the inner cylinder rotating. The method of solution is based on the general finite-difference procedure for solving elliptic partial differential equations developed by Gosman et al.(1)‡. The solutions show that, for an eccentricity of 0.5, even modest levels of swirl greatly reduce the large circumferential variation in Nusselt number that is present without swirl. Moreover rotation appears to offer a particularly effective way of increasing the level of heat transfer since, for a Prandtl number of 0.7, the Nusselt number is raised by twice as much as the friction factor.