科创中国

新兴行业

This work began in a Ph.D. in 1982, based in East Kilbride, Scotland,U.K., on seeking a means to estimate the natural convection performance of aircooled heat exchangers at the two worst possible scenarios for safety in the chemical and processing industry, and associated with the prototype fastbreeder reactor project at Dounreay, Scotland. The Ph.D. was a study of the plume, believed to behave like a solid chimney above the heat exchanger and resulted in reasonable means ofsimulating small face dimension heat exchanger. Industry experts were however of the opinion that larger face dimensions would exhibit a siginificant plumechimney effect. The funding agency did not investigate this further but Chu (2002, 2006) managed to produce correlations that could estimate this effect more accurately than the previous formula introduced by Doyle and Benkly (1973), and an article was published in the Chemical Engineering Progress (Chu, 2005).With the fundamental grant available, the project on plumechimney was revived in 2007 at Universiti Malaysia Sabah Malaysia, after over 20 years without any literature published in the world. Due to the limited amount of grant, the objective of establishing the existence of effective plumechimney could only be demonstrated partially by experiments