Determination of Temperature Distributions of Fully Wet Rectangular, Triangular, and Parabolic Straight Fins

Abstract

A numerical simulation is performed to determine the temperature distribution along fully wet fins of different geometric profiles under different relative humidity and surrounding temperature conditions. Four straight fin profiles are considered in this study: rectangular, triangular, concave parabolic, and convex parabolic. The same base thickness and length are used for consistency. The current work extends equations formulated in previous studies and applies them to the different fins to characterize their temperature distributions. The impact of the variation in the operating conditions on the fin tips and temperature distributions along the fin profiles is investigated. The simulation results confirm that increasing the surrounding temperature and relative humidity levels increases the temperature along the fins for all profiles. In addition, parametric studies indicate that the assumption of fully wet fins may be violated depending on the operating conditions. This is an important deviation from previous works that may have not considered the fully wet fin assumption.