Document Type : Research Paper
Authors
1 National Institute of Technology Great Eastern Road, Amanaka, Raipur, Chhattisgarh
2 National Institute of Technology, Mechanical Engineering Department, G.E. Road, Raipur, Chhattisgarh
3 Mechanical Engineering Department, National Institute of Technology, Raipur, Chattisgarh
Abstract
Neonatal incubators provide an artificial thermal environment to maintain the thermoregulation of premature babies. Several studies revealed the dry and latent heat exchange estimation between newborn's body and surrounding environment. Heat transfer due to convection is leading over the thermal radiation in incubators. The aim of this article is to study the air flow modeling and estimation of heat transfer coefficient over an infant body inside incubator. For this purpose, an experiment and numerical simulation is carried out to develop the methodology and subsequently computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis is accomplished to evaluate the heat transfer coefficient of a preterm infant. By means of shear stress transport (SST K-ω) turbulence model, 3-D computational models are numerically studied using commercial CFD tool StarCCM+. Flow visualization reveal that large-scale flow circulation pattern is produced in mean region of enclosed chamber, and small scale eddies are generated at corners and close to the walls. The numerical results obtained for heat transfer assessment in present study is validated with experimental and numerical results available in biomedical open literature.
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