Investigation of the effect of a vertical rotating blade on heat transfer enhancement from a flat plate

Heat transfer enhancement from a flat plate in which a thin blade is rotating at a certain speed in the vicinity of the plate has been investigated in the present study. For this numerical study, the finite volume method was used in which the rotation of the blade was simulated by the definition of sliding mesh and interface boundary within the computational domain. The equations of mass, momentum, and energy were solved in two-dimensional and transient form for airflow with constant physical properties using Fluent commercial software and the details of the flow and thermal fields were obtained at the top of the plate. The rotational Reynolds number of the blade has been changed in the range of 1360-5460 and the dimensionless parameter of blade-end-to-plate distance to the blade length (d/D) was ranged from 0.105 to 0.420. The results indicated that heat transfer from the plate is improved by increasing the rotational speed of the blade, especially on the front side of the rotating blade, while the effect of the d/D was effective only over a limited area of the plate central section