Lecture 26, March 10, 2004

• Assignment 3 – Due Monday at the end of the

day
• Wind Chill

We talked about several different correlations for heat

transfer, and in particular we developed the analytic
solution for laminar flow over a flat plate. We also
talked about the special case of a flat plate with an
unheated starting length as in a circuit board. Is there
another, perhaps more general way of analyzing
these types of problems?

We can modify our finite volume technique to account

for advection of energy through the control volume
faces. Consider our control volume.

The conduction terms are evaluated exactly as

before, i.e.

And, we account for the advection of heat energy at

each face, i.e.

The velocity component at the face (u in this case) is

evaluated using the Blasius solution, and the
temperature at the face can be approximated as
This will simply add a few coefficients to your matrix,
which can easily be solved for the temperature field
considering advection and conduction. As the
situation gets even more complicated as in the case
of flow separation or turbulent flow, you can use more
powerful computational fluid dynamics codes to solve
for the velocity field and proceed in exactly the same
manner.

So far we have developed and looked at equations for

the Nusselt number which are for the case of a
constant surface temperature. We can also solve the
case of a constant surface heat flux, and this results
in different constants.

The constant heat flux equations are presented in

section 7.2.4 Æ do not confuse them for the unheated
starting length equations directly above them – the
text is badly layed out in this section. These
equations have slightly higher constants (more so for
laminar flow), since the flux does not decrease with
distance along the plate, but is forced to stay
constant.

Example
Cooling at high elevation. Consider the heat transfer
from a flat plate that is 6m by 1.5m and held at a fixed
temperature of 134 oC. The plate is located in Denver
Colorado at high elevation, where the atmospheric
pressure is 83.4 kPa. Air at this pressure flows over
the plate at 8m/s and a temperature of 20 oC.

Determine the heat transfer from the plate for the

case of
a) flow aligned with the 6m side.
b) Flow aligned with the 1.5 m side.

Properties evaluated at the film temperature

(134+20)/2 = 77oC.
k = 0.0297 W/mK
Pr = 0.706
Nu = 2.06 e-5 m2/s

Assumptions
• Steady/stationary
• Rex,cr = 5 e5
• No Radiation
• Air is an ideal gas
• k, mu, cp and Pr are independent of pressure.

Density is a function of pressure and temperature,

therefore nu will vary with pressure for an ideal gas.
This will change our kinematic viscosity, and hence
our Reynolds number.

a) When the air is parallel to the 6m side.

This is beyond the critical Reynolds number for

transition to turbulence, and therefore we need to
account for both Laminar and Turbulent portions of
the plate. Fortunately, there is a correlation in the
text which does just this.
Note that had we not accounted for the Laminar
portion we would have found,

And overpredicted the heat transfer by 28%.

b) When the flow is parallel to the 1.5m side,

The heat transfer is enhaced 67% simply by changing
the orientation of the plate.

If we managed to trip a turbulent boundary layer at

the leading edge (golf ball/ sand paper on a plane
wing).