Turbulent Natural Convective Heat Transfer from Narrow Plates

Abstract

Earlier chapters have dealt mainly with natural convective heat transfer from narrow plates in the case where the flow over the plate is laminar. However, in many practical situations the natural convective flow over what is effectively a narrow plate is turbulent and hence, there is a need to predict edge effects and heat transfer rates from narrow vertical and inclined plates when the flow over the plate is in transition region between the laminar and the turbulent flow regions or in the turbulent flow region. Numerically, derived results for these situations are discussed in this chapter. The results indicate that for the conditions considered the dimensionless width of a vertical flat plate has essentially no effect on the mean Nusselt number in the transitional and turbulent regions, but that when the plate is inclined the dimensionless width of the inclined flat plate can have an effect on the heat transfer rate when the flow over the plate is in the transitional and turbulent regions.