Turbulent free convection heat transfer to power-law fluids from arbitrary geometric configurations

Abstract

The problem of turbulent free convection heat transfer from curved surfaces to non-Newtonian power-law fluids has been investigated using the Nakayama-Koyama solution methodology. The scheme is designed to deal with bodies of arbitrary geometric configurations and hence can be viewed as a generalized version of the Shenoy-Mashelkar approach for turbulent free convection heat transfer from a flat vertical plate to a power-law fluid. The surface wall temperature is allowed to vary in the streamwise direction in an arbitrary fashion, and calculations are carried out for the turbulent free convection about the horizontal circular cylinder and sphere for illustrative purposes. Available theoretical and experimental data have been compared with the predictions of the present analysis and the comparison of results has been found to be reasonably good.