Abstract
Compact heat exchangers are of great technological importance in many industries such as automotive, submarine and spacecraft industry. Micro-channel cooling is an area which is providing a new platform for the development of these compact heat exchange devices. Micro-channel flows and heat transfer characteristics are different from what is usually observed in macrochannel flows. In the present work, computational fluid dynamics is used as a tool to study the influence of variable thermophysical properties on the Nusselt number, skin friction and pressure drop for different channel diameter, fluid inlet velocities, and heat fluxes. The Nusselt number and pressure drop is found to be higher for variable properties as compared to constant properties for an increase in diameters, inlet velocities, and heat fluxes.