Heat Transfer And Pressure Drop Measurements For Mini 3D Printed Tubes Using Different Fabrication Parameters

Abstract

The report is intended as an investigation of heat transfer and pressure drop using 3D-printed tubes fabricated by Beijing E-plus and BLT in the horizontal direction under isothermal and uniform heat flux boundary conditions. Distilled water was used to conduct the experiments at Reynolds number of 800-10000 covering laminar, transition, and turbulent regions with heat fluxes varying from 30 to 500 kW·m2. The test tubes are 2 mm in diameter on the interior and 3 mm on the exterior. The results are compared with earlier research on traditional cold-rolled tubes. The friction factor data of the Beijing E-plus 3D-printed tube shared a similar trend to the BLT 3D-printed tube but entirely different to the traditional cold-rolled tube. The findings show that the traditional cold-rolled tube has an average critical Reynolds number of about 2300, while that of the Beijing E-plus tube and BLT tube is about 2100. Furthermore, at the critical Reynolds number, the non-isothermal friction factor of the Beijing E-plus tube is 19.33% greater than that of the BLT tube. It has been confirmed that, in the laminar zone, the 3D-printed tubes of Beijing E-plus and BLT and traditional cold-rolled tubes, the heat transfer magnitude is nearly identical. However, the Nusselt numbers of the Beijing E-plus tube and BLT tube increased by an average of 80.8% and 72%, respectively, when compared to the traditional cold-rolled tube in the upper transition and the turbulent regions