Discussion Forum

I’m having the following situation:
A large steel block with some polymer insides which has been heated up and is now cooled by some cooling channels with water, convective cooling and radiation cooling.
As I now want to optimise the cooling system I want to know how much energy is gone out of the system through the cooling channels.

Already some different calculations methods are used.
But I’m always facing some interpretation problems when I want to calculate a value and try to set it in a value over a longer time range.
My system is time dependant, and I want to know the energy gone out of the system via the cooling channels.

I know the inlet temperatures and the outlet-temperatures. From the cooling channels. But I think I can not use the formula Q=m*Cp*DT because the temperature at inlet is in time before the outlet temperature. And how to integrate this over a time period?

I also calculated already the total required heat loss of the fluid by taking averages of mass, heat capacity and temperature. But this leaded to a strange behaviour.
The faster the cooling liquid is going the more it is absorbing heat in the beginning.
But when I do a summation of all times I see that the lower speeds are having higher total absorption of energy.

The timeint could be a solution but it takes very long time to calculate and I’m not certain this could help me further.