Effects of Creep Flow and Viscous Dissipation in the Slip Regime for Isoflux Rectangular Microchannels

The effects of rarefaction on convective heat transfer and pressure drop characteristics are numerically evaluated for uniform wall heat flux rectangular microchannels. Results are obtained by numerically solving the momentum and energy equations with both first- and second-order slip velocity and temperature jump boundary conditions. The resulting velocity and temperature fields are then evaluated to obtain the microchannel Poiseuille and Nusselt numbers. In addition to the effects of rarefaction, the effects of aspect ratio, thermal creep flow, and viscous dissipation are investigated for locally fully developed Poiseuille and Nusselt numbers. The constant wall heat flux results obtained in this study are compared to constant wall temperature results obtained previously, using the same numerical algorithm, at various aspect ratios including the limiting case of parallel plate microchannels. In addition to supplying previously unreported data on slip flow convective heat transfer and pressure drop characteristics, these results verify the numerical algorithm for more complex future slip flow analyses.