Improvement of thermal performance of the floor heating system using the metallic bridges

This research is a numerical investigation about the thermal performance of the floor heating system integrated with metallic bridges. For this goal, aluminum and galvanized metallic bridges with 0.5 mm thickness were embedded within the free space of the pipes. Three different bridge lengths of P/S=2/3, and 1 were studied in this paper in which P and S are the bridge length and free space between two adjacent pipes, respectively. On the other hand, for the floor heating system, two water fluid temperatures of 40◦C and 50◦C were considered. Several results have been obtained in this study. For example, thermal performance of the floor heating system enhances with maximum 12.82% and 6.41% for 40◦C and 12.88% and 6.43% for 50◦C using metallic bridges in comparison to the conventional case (without metallic bridges) in which the rate of heat transfer enhancement of heating panel using the aluminum bridge was 6.05% higher than that of galvanized bridge. Additionally, by increasing the bridge length from to 1, the thermal performance of the floor heating system increases up to maximum 7.04%.