Heat Transfer Enhancement through Impingement of Flows and its Application in Lock-up Clutches

An impinging-flow based methodology of enhancing the heat transfer in the grooves of a lockup clutch is proposed and studied. In order to evaluate its efficacy and reveal the mechanism, the three-dimensional flow within the groove was solved as a conjugate heat transfer problem in a rotating reference frame using the commercial CFD code FLUENT. The turbulence characteristics were predicted using k-ε model. The comparison of cooling effect was made between a simple baseline groove pattern and a typical flow-impingement based groove pattern of the same groove-to-total area ratio in terms of heat rejection ratio, maximum surface temperature, and heat transfer coefficient. It is found that more heat can be rejected with the impinging-flow based groove from the friction surface than with the baseline while the maximum surface temperature is lower in the former case. The reason for the enhanced heat transfer is found to be the significant increase in turbulence level around the impingement points, i.e. enhanced local turbulence mixing. The effect of relative rotational motion of the plate on the flow in the groove is studied and some technical solutions of compensating this effect are discussed.