Abstract
In this work, an experimental analysis is made to predict the thermal performance of the natural-convection phenomenon from a heated vertical externally finned-tube to surrounding air through an open-ended enclosure. Two different configurations of longitudinal rectangular fin namely, continuous and interrupted are utilized with constant thickness, different numbers, and different heights are extended radially on the outer surface of a heated tube. The tube is heated electrically from inner surface with five varied power input magnitudes. The effect of fins configuration, fins number, fins height, and heat flux of the inner tube surface on the thermal performance of natural convection have been studied and analyzed experimentally. Obtained results show that the tube with twelve interrupted longitudinal fins gives the best natural-convection thermal performance in terms of average Nusselt number, about 20% greater than that for the tube with continuous fins. Experimental correlations to predict the average Nusselt number for the heated tubes with continuous and interrupted longitudinal fins are proposed. The present data are compared to previous study and good convergence is noticed.
Highlights
The natural-convection heat transfer from a vertical, horizontal, and inclined heated finned tube in different fin positions to surrounding air occurs in a many industrial and engineering applications
The objective of the present work is to present an experimental analysis for the natural heat convection from vertical externally finned-tube to surrounding air inside an open-ended enclosure utilizing two different configurations of external longitudinal fin, continuous and interrupted, with different numbers, heights, and regular distributed radially on the external surface of the heated tube
The present work has performed an experimental analysis of a heated vertical externally-finned tube inside an opened enclosure exposed to natural-convection
Summary
The natural-convection heat transfer from a vertical, horizontal, and inclined heated finned tube in different fin positions to surrounding air occurs in a many industrial and engineering applications. Stewart and Verhulst [2] experimentally investigated the two dimensional natural-convection from a two heated copper horizontal tubes to cooled rectangular-section enclosure at constant temperature condition to simulate the naturalconvection heat transfer in systems of the underground thermal distribution. They correlated the experimental data to determine the Nusselt number for Rayleigh numbers ranging from 2.1×108 to 4.8×109, and found that the naturalconvection heat coefficients computed for underground or utility corridors case with air as working fluid smaller compared with other experimental correlations for concentric tubes.
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