ABSTRACT
Computational Heat Transfer (CHT) has experienced exceptional advances due to the improved computer hardware combined with the development of advanced numerical techniques and algorithms over the last decade. Numerical simulation has emerged as an alternative and, sometimes, as the only approach to analyze in detail, complex thermal-fluid phenomena. However, CHT is still at the stage of intensive development, particularly in engineering applications, where most of the problems considered in the past involve significant simplifications regarding geometry, physics and parameter range. Many computational techniques for thermal-fluid problems have been proposed, tested, and refined, mainly for steady flow and time-averaged conservation laws, the latter for modeling transport phenomenon in turbulent flows. Recently, there has been an increasing trend toward simulation of more complex thermal-fluid phenomena with a level of complexity that is close to industrial applications. CHT is therefore becoming an emerging field, not only in fundamental research, but also as a design and analysis tool in engineering practice [1, 2].
