Paper presented to the 10th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Florida, 14-16 July 2014.
In this paper, we present a numerical study of the flow
characteristics and heat transfer mechanism of a non-
Newtonian fluid in an annular space between two coaxial
rotating cylinders taking into account the effect of viscous
dissipation. The Carreau stress-strain relation was adopted to
model the rheological fluid behavior. The problem is studied
when the heated inner cylinder rotates around the common axis
with constant and the cooled outer cylinder is at the rest. The
horizontal endplates are assumed adiabatic.
A house code which is based on a Galerkin mixed finite
element is developed to obtain numerical solutions of the
complete governing equations and associated boundary
conditions and is validated with the results reported in the
literature.
It is found that five parameters can describe the problem
under consideration, the Reynolds number (Re), the Grashof
number (Gr) , the index of structure (n), Weissenberg number
(We) and the Eckert number (Ec). The velocity, temperature
and stream function distributions and the local Nusselt number
variations are drawn for different dimensionless groups.
