Integral solution method of the laminar conjugated natural convection heat transfer from a hollow cylinder

Abstract

The laminar conjugated natural convection heat transfer from a hollow cylinder is a common problem in engineering. The accurate calculation of the hot-spot temperature helps to monitor and evaluate the operating status of the equipment. In this paper, first, a mathematical model of the conjugated natural convection from a hollow cylinder is established. The boundary layer integral equations under arbitrary heat flux distribution on the surface are derived, and the optimal velocity and temperature profiles corresponding to different Prandtl numbers are determined. By combining the integral equations and the thermal network model, the hot-spot temperature and the average surface temperature of a hollow cylinder are solved iteratively. Subsequently, a computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulation based on finite volume method is carried out to verify the accuracy of the integral solution method. The maximum relative error of the computed results of the two methods is 1.35%. The integral solution method performs much better in computation speed, increasing by 90 times. It is also found that as the thermal conductivity of solid materials decreases, although the hot-spot temperature increases, the average surface temperature remains basically unchanged. Finally, based on the lumped thermal equivalent circuit, the correlation of the Nusselt number corresponding to the hot-spot temperature is predicted. The parameters in the correlation are estimated by regression orthogonal design. The results show that under a wide range of solid thermal conductivity and fluid Prandtl numbers, the maximum error of the correlation is 6.02%. Therefore, this novel method is feasible and significant for calculating hot-spot temperature.