Viscous Dissipation and Rarefaction Effects on Laminar Forced Convection in Microchannels

Fluid flow in microchannels has some characteristics, which one of them is rarefaction effect related with gas flow. In the present work, hydrodynamically and thermally fully developed laminar forced convection heat transfer of a rarefied gas flow in two microgeometries is studied, namely, microannulus and parallel plate microchannel. The rarefaction effects are taken into consideration using first-order slip velocity and temperature jump boundary conditions. Viscous heating is also included for either the wall heating or the wall cooling case. Closed form expressions are obtained for dimensionless temperature distribution and Nusselt number. The results demonstrate that for both geometries, as Brinkman number increases, the Nusselt number decreases. However, the effect of viscous heating on the Nusselt number at greater values of Knudsen number becomes insignificant. In the absence of viscous heating, increasing values of Knudsen number lead to smaller values of Nusselt number. Furthermore, it is observed that viscous heating causes singularities in Nusselt number values. Also, asymmetry causes singularities in Nusselt numbers of both microannulus walls and the parallel plate wall having lower heat flux, even in the absence of viscous heating. For parallel plate microchannel, in the absence of viscous heating, Nusselt number of the wall having larger heat flux is an increasing function of the wall heat fluxes ratio.