Identification of Dominant Heat Transfer Modes Associated With the Impingement of an Elliptical Jet Array

The characteristics of the impinging heat transfer of a three-by-three square array of submerged, elliptic impinging jets was studied. Low Reynolds number conditions, 300 to 1500, are considered for two different elliptic jet aspect ratios, with the impingement distance ranging from 1 to 6 jet hydraulic diameters. A transient thermochromic liquid crystal method was used to map the local heat transfer coefficient distribution. The results are reported for the unit cell under the center jet and detail the mean heat transfer as well as the characteristics of the spatial variation of the heat transfer coefficient. The average heat transfer is found to depend inversely on the elliptic jet aspect ratio at these low Reynolds numbers. Distributions of the heat transfer coefficient, h, are also used to obtain proper orthogonal decompositions of h which are used to identify major spatially distributed features. [S0022-1481(00)02102-2]