CFD-based optimal design of manifold in plate-fin microdevices [An article from: Chemical Engineering Journal]

This digital document is a journal article from Chemical Engineering Journal, published by Elsevier in 2004. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
Most microdevices are usually developed ad hoc, on the basis of engineers' experience-there is no systematic procedure for developing a microdevice. In this research, as the first step for the systematic design of microdevices, a design problem of a plate-fin microdevice was focused on, and characteristics of flow pattern inside plate-fin microdevices were investigated by using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The simulation results show that the flow uniformity among branched microchannels depends largely on shapes of manifolds, length and location of fins, and inlet flow rate. A CFD-based optimization method is proposed for the design of plate-fin microdevices. With the proposed method, the optimal manifold shape that minimizes space time under the constraint on flow uniformity is automatically derived. The proposed method has a potential as an optimal design tool for various devices.