MASS-TRANSFER ENHANCEMENT BY LONGITUDINAL VORTICES

From numerical and experimental investigations it has been recently es tablished that convective heat transfer can be dramatically enhanced b y the generation of longitudinal vortices in the flow. The phenomenolo gical similarity between heat and mass transfer suggests that longitud inal vortices should increase also mass transfer. The mixing between t wo parallel streams of two components in a rectangular channel with an d without a pair of rectangular winglets as vortex generators has been numerically investigated. The results show that one pair of vortex ge nerators can increase the global mixing by more than 50 for laminar fl ow. This global mixing has been defined as the sum of the square of th e differences of concentrations.