Propagation of Uncertainty in a Rotating Pipe Mechanism to Generate an Impinging Swirling Jet Flow for Heat Transfer from a Flat Plate

Abstract

In Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) studies composed of the coupling of different simulations, the uncertainty in one stage may be propagated to the following stage and affect the accuracy of the prediction. In this paper, a framework for uncertainty quantification in the computational heat transfer by forced convection is applied to the two-step simulation of the mechanical design of a swirling jet flow generated by a rotating pipe (Simulation 1) impinging on a flat plate (Simulation 2). This is the first probabilistic uncertainty analysis on computational heat transfer by impinging jets in the literature. The conclusion drawn from the analysis of this frequent engineering application is that the simulated system does not exhibit a significant sensitivity to stochastic variations of model input parameters, over the tested uncertainty ranges. Additionally, a set of nonlinear regression models for the stochastic velocity and turbulent profiles for the pipe nozzle are created and tested, since impinging jets for heat transfer at Reynolds number of 23,000 are very frequent in the literature, but stochastic inlet conditions have never been provided. Numerical results demonstrate a negligible difference in the predicted convective heat transfer with respect to the use of the profiles simulated via CFD. These suggested surrogate models can be directly embedded onto other engineering applications (e.g. arrays of jets, jet flows impinging on plates with different shapes, inlet piping in combustion, chemical mixing, etc.) in which a realistic swirling flow under uncertainty can be of interest.