Flow and heat transfer characteristics in a spirally grooved tube are considered. Fully developed laminar flow is analyzed by the boundary perturbation method and heat transfer by the finite difference scheme. As the simplist case of a spirally grooved tube, a spirally fluted tube is considered. The boundary perturbation method proves to be a better tool for computing the case of various dimensionless geometry ratios(ε,k,n) in the range Re＜200, ε＜0.1, Pr＜2.0 and it needs smaller calculation time.
The velocity and temperature profiles for the case of an axisymmetric tube are compared with the results of Chow et al. and Sparrow et al. and show good consistency
For the case of the spirally fluted tube(n=2,k=1.5) the Nusselt number increases with geometry ratio(ε) upto Re=70, but for Re＞70 it decreases as ε rises. So for Re＞70, the spiral flute is not an attractive heat transfer enhancement configuration.
In this paper only the first order solution is considered and the friction coefficient as a function of ε cannot be obtained exactly. So higher order solutions need to be added for better results.
