Numerical Investigation of Incompressible Flow past Circular Tubes in Confined Channel

A three-dimensional computational code has been developed for the investigation of unsteady laminar flow past single and two inline circular tubes cross-confined in a channel. The developed code is based on SIMPLE algorithm using finite volume technique to solve the governing equations. A body-fitted, multi-block structured grid has been generated for discretization of the incompressible form of conservation equations of mass, momentum and energy. The computational results correspond to a fixed Reynolds number of 400 based on tube diameter. The instantaneous flow and heat transfer characteristics for single and two inline tubes have been compared using streamline plots, temperature contours, vorticity contours, span-averaged pressure and span-averaged Nusselt number.