Convection heat transfer in microchannels with high speed gas flow

This paper presents an experimental investigation of convective heat transfer for laminar gas flow through a microchannel. A test stand was set up to impose thermal boundary conditions of constant temperature gradient along the microchannel length. Additionally, thin film temperature sensors were developed and used to directly measure the microchannel surface temperature. Heat transfer experiments were conducted with laminar nitrogen gas flow, in which the outlet Ma was between 0.10 and 0.42. The experimental measurements of inlet and outlet gas temperature and the microchannel wall temperature were used to validate a two-dimensional numerical model for gaseous flow in microchannel. The model was then used to determine local values of Ma, Re, and Nu. The numerical results show that after the entrance region, Nu approaches 8.23, the fully developed value of Nu for incompressible flow for constant wall heat flux if Nu is defined based on (Tw -Tref) and plotted as a function of the new dimensionless axial length, X*=(x/2H) (Ma2)/(Re Pr). Copyright © 2007 by ASME