An experimental and numerical study of forced convection heat transfer from rectangular fins at low Reynolds numbers

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental and numerical study of forced convection heat transfer from straight rectangular fins on a horizontal surface at low Reynolds numbers ranging from 2600 to 6800. Heat transfer for a fixed number of fins, fin spacing, and length was measured in a wind tunnel for varying inlet air velocity and heat input. Three-dimensional conjugate heat transfer simulations were also conducted to characterize important features of heat transfer and flow of the fin array and the effects of fin channel length on heat transfer. A maximum relative error of about 4.28% was found between the experimental and the numerical results for the average Nusselt number. The experimental results showed that forced convection heat transfer is characterized by an approximately linear relationship between the Nusselt and Reynolds numbers, which also agreed reasonably well with the available correlations for fully developed turbulent convective heat transfer for tubes with uniform heat flux. Further investigations of the effects of fin geometry were made numerically. Shorter fin channels, where the flow is thermally and hydrodynamically developing, were more effective in heat transfer than longer ones, where the flow approaches or reaches full development. It is shown that heat transfer rate per channel decreases linearly with the increase in channel length, but remains approximately constant with the increase in number of fins. It is also shown that the contributions of natural convection and radiation were negligible for the specific fin design and the range of inlet flow conditions and maximum fin temperature investigated here.