Oktober 2025
Thermal study of Rayleigh–Bénard convection in heat transfer oils
Buoyancy flows driven by temperature gradients play a major role in many industrial and energy applications. Natural, forced or mixed convection occur for example in heat exchangers, thermal energy storages (TES), solar thermal power generation and organic Rankine cycles (ORC). Large temperature ranges and gradients need to be resolved experimentally in fundamental research in order to understand and optimize the heat transfer and the system’s efficiency. The temperature and flow morphology can be studied with two-color laser-induced fluorescence (2c-LIF). We optimized our 2c-LIF technique for studying natural convection in heat transfer oils. Heat flux and thermal plume propagation are analysed in a Rayleigh–Bénard convection cell, which allows large temperature differences of up to 120 K. The details can be found in our new article, which was published in "Experiments in Fluids". The full paper is freely available here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00348-025-04113-x
We acknowledge financial support by Universität der Bundeswehr München (UniBw M).
