Effective cooling and heating are very important aspects of various industrial, commercial and residential processes to maintain a required temperature level for many reasons including thermal stabilization/ management and/or product quality control.

The most comprehensive analysis of enhanced heat transfer mechanisms, techniques, surfaces and performance evaluation criteria for variety of heat exchanger types are given in Webb (1994). It also contains over 9,500 literature references on the subject in CD form.Figure 1 and Figure 2 below clearly indicate the increasing interest to the area of heat transfer enhancement throughout the last century.

Figure 1 cited in Manglik and Bergles (2004) shows the number of journal and conference publications on augmentation per year between 1850 and 2001 while Figure 2 summarizes the U.S. patent activity from 1928 to 1983 Webb et al. (1983). Both figures illustrate that rapid growth of the publications and patents began in the 1950s-1960s and is continuing into the new millennium.

Dimpled surfaces - heat transfer surfaces formed by three-dimensional cavities with specific geometry and mutual orientation have been attracting attention in the world research and engineering community since the early 1980s as an efficient means of heat transfer augmentation. They are still the subject of much detailed research, reflecting the complexity of the heat transfer mechanisms occurring in the cavities.

Despite the wide spectrum of work on heat transfer augmentation in general and the large volume of published experimental data Shchukin et al. (2003), Shchukin et al. (1998) and numerical modeling results Isaev et al. (2004) on dimpled surfaces in particular, the availability of design information for dimpled surfaces is very limited.