Numerical study on the thermal and flow characteristics of periodically formed inner wavy structures in a cooling channel

In industrial fields of machine and aerospace, cooling systems consisting of channels are widely used to increase energy efficiency and prevent system overheat. In cooling channels, a reduced pressure drop, an enhanced heat transfer, and a short channel length are considered key design requirements for optimizing the total volume and weight of a system. In this work, we improved heat transfer efficiency by using milli-scale wavy structures inside the channel. By optimizing the inner structures through computational fluid dynamics analysis and Taguchi method, the Nusselt number increased by approximately 11.7% with a similar pressure drop compared with that of a normal channel for a Reynolds number of 1000.