Prediction of forced convection heat transfer to Lead-Bismuth-Eutectic

Abstract: The goal of this work is to investigate the capabilities of two different commercial codes, OpenFOAM and ANSYS CFX, to predict forced convection heat transfer in low Prandtl number fluids and investigate the sensitivity of these predictions to the type of code and to several input parameters.The goal of the work is accomplished by predicting forced convection heat transfer in two different experimental setups with the codes OpenFOAM and ANSYS CFX using three different turbulence models and varying the input parameters in an extensive sensitivity analysis. The computational results are compared two the experimental data and analyzed for qualitative and quantitative parameters, such as shape of velocity and temperature profiles, thickness of the boundary layers and wall temperatures.The results show that predictions of the temperature and velocity field are generally sufficient to good, however, the sensitivity especially to the turbulent Prandtl number has to be taken into account when computing forced convection heat transfer in low Prandtl number fluids. The results also show that methods applied to OpenFOAM cannot directly be applied to ANSYS CFX.