Prediction of transient temperature distributions in the wall of curved piping system subjected to internally thermal stratification flow

This paper addresses a numerical method for predicting transient temperature distributions in the wall of a curved pipe subjected to internally thermal stratification flow. A simple and convenient numerical method of treating the unsteady conjugate heat transfer in the non-orthogonal coordinate systems is presented. The proposed method is implemented in a finite volume thermal-hydraulic computer code based on a cell-centered, non-staggered grid arrangement, the SIMPLEC algorithm, a higher-order bounded convection scheme, and the modified version of momentum interpolation method. Calculations are performed for the transient evolution of thermal stratification in two curved pipes, where the one has thick wall and the other has so thin wall that its presence can be negligible in the heat transfer analysis. The predicted results show that the thermally stratified flow and transient conjugate heat transfer in a curved pipe with a finite wall thickness can be satisfactorily analyzed by the present numerical method, and that the neglect of wall thickness in the prediction of pipe wall temperature distributions can provide unacceptably distorted results