CFD Analysis of Steady Laminar Natural Convection Heat Transfer from a Pin Finned Isothermal Vertical Plate

Abstract

AbstractHeat transfer behavior with both the conductive and nonconductive fins have been analyzed by examining variations of the local and average Nusselt numbers in two‐dimensional flow. The main objective of this study is to quantify and compare the natural convection heat transfer enhancement of fin array with different fin aspect ratio and at different angles of inclination. It is found that significant heat transfer augmentation is obtained for both conductive and nonconductive fins. For conductive fins 20% higher augmentation factor is obtained when the fin aspect ratio is 6, angle of inclination is 60° and the pitch‐to‐length ratio is 0.2. For nonconductive fins, 10% higher augmentation factor is obtained when fin aspect ratio is 8, angle of inclination is 45° and pitch‐to‐length ratio at 0.5. A general correlation has been developed to predict the average Nusselt number and heat transfer augmentation factor for conductive and nonconductive fin arrays as a function of different fin configurations.