Mechanical Engineering Graduate Seminar today (Tuesday, March 13) Mechanical Engineering Graduate Seminar today (Tuesday, March 13)

T.S. Ravi, professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at WSU, will give a talk as a part of Mechanical Engineering Graduate Seminar Series from 2-3 p.m. today (Tuesday, March 13) in 126 Clinton Hall. Ravi will present "Flow in Bifurcated Microchannels and its Relevance to Contemporary Biomedical and Clinical Applications."

Microchannels are utilized in many applications because of their characteristically large heat transfer area to unit volume ratios, leading to higher efficiency compared to conventional channels. Due to their compactness, they are mainly focused on electronic cooling applications; in recent times, their application is rapidly expanding to uses, including the medical field. However, the small channel size increases the pressure drop as well.

Present study focuses on optimizing the performance of the microchannels by carrying out single phase flow analysis of lung bronchial-like branched structures using ANSYS (Fluent) for different aspect ratios (AR) between 0.5, 1.0, 1.5 and 2.0 at the inlet, and at different bifurcation angles of 30, 45, 60 and 70 degrees. Simulations were carried out for steady state and laminar flow conditions.

Results so far show that the increase in pressure drop is lesser with increase in AR and achieved better uniformity in temperature throughout the channel length for higher AR. As an illustration, these concepts are applied to study blood flow in arteries under different clinical conditions.