Monday January 26

Last Day
• Conduction resistance in cylindrical systems Æ
critical insulation radius
Today
• Systems with internal generation
• Extended surface heat transfer

Systems with generation

Assume uniform generation within our ‘wall’, and assume

identical conditions on each side. Let’s determine the
temperature distribution through the wall.

Considering conservation of energy on a control volume

within the wall,

The slope of the temperature distribution must be

decreasing as we move through our wall in the x direction
(at least up to the symmetry plane).
What happens at the centreline? The centreline is a
symmetry plane, and therefore there is no temperature
gradient there. All of the heat energy generated in the first
half of the wall must exit the left face of the wall.

This can easily be extended to more complicated systems.

Extended Surface Heat Transfer (Fins)

The rate of heat transfer from a surface can be described by
Netwon’s law of cooling. q = hA(Ts – Tinf). How can we
increase this rate of heat transfer.
• Increase h
• Increase A
• Increase (Ts – Tinf)

Increasing the surface area is what extended surface heat

transfer is all about.

We shall limit our analysis of these systems to

• Steady state
• 1-D
• no internal generation (in the fin itself)
And, for the analytic solutions
• constant k
• constant h
o h depends on fluid motion which is impeded near
the base of the fin and significantly different near
the fan.
 o The way the area is increased will have an impact
on h as well.

The analytic solutions we develop will ignore radiation

effects, which are very straight forward to include in
numerical solutions.

Conservation of energy within our control volume:

This is the equation that we will use to solve numerically,

without limitation on the variation of k, P, Ac or h. When
we want an analytic solution however, we need to assume
that these parameters are constant.

Introduce the excess temperature,

which is the driving force for convection at each x location,

and it simplifies our temperature expression. Also,
look at table 3.4 in the text, for a collection of solutions to
this equation for various tip boundary condition.