Effects of longitudinal heat conduction of a vertical thin plate in a natural convective cooling process

Abstract

This paper analyzes the cooling process of a vertical thin plate caused by a free convective flow, taking into account the effects of both longitudinal and transversal heat conduction in the plate. Due to the finite thermal conductivity of the plate, a longitudinal temperature gradient arises within it, which prevents any similarity solution in the boundary layer, changing the mathematical character of the problem from parabolic to elliptic, for large values of the Rayleigh number. The energy balance equations are reduced to a system of three differential equations with two parameters: the Prandtl number and a non-dimensional plate thermal conductivity α. In order to obtain the evolution of the temperature of the plate as a function of time and position, the coupled balance equations are integrated numerically for several values of the parameters, including the cases of very good and poor conducting plates. The results obtained, are compared with an asymptotic analysis based on the multiple scales technique carried out for the case of a very good conducting plate. There is at the beginning a fast transient in non-dimensional time scale of order α−1 followed by a slow non-dimensional time scale of order unity, which gives the evolution of the cooling process. Good agreement is achieved even for values of the conduction parameter α of order unity. The asymptotic solution allows us to give closed form analytical solution for the plate temperature evolution in time and space. The overall thermal energy of the plate decreases faster for smaller values of α.