Heat transfer to liquid metals along a circular cylinder with uniform surface heat flux

Abstract

The effects of axial heat conduction on laminar forced convective heat transfer to liquid metals along a circular cylinder are studied analytically for the case of uniform surface heat flux. The transformed conservation equations governing the nonsimilar boundary layers are solved by the local nonsimilarity method. Local heat transfer results are presented for liquid metals having Prandtl numbers of 0.003, 0.008, and 0.03 over a wide range of values of the transverse curvature and axial heat conduction parameter. It is found that the local Nusselt number increases with increasing transverse curvature of the cylindrical surface, with increasing axial heat conduction effect (i.e., decreasing Peclet number), and with increasing Prandtl number.