Lecture 31, March 22, 2004

Natural Convection Contd.

What is it that resists this buoyancy force?

Viscous forces
The resulting flow will be governed by a balance of
viscous and buoyant forces in constrast to a balance
of inertial and viscous forces in the case of forced
convection (which was governed by the Reynolds
number).
We need a new dimensionless parameter to describe
free convection flows.

Introduce the Grashof number

We can expect, in general then that free convection

flows may be governed by Re, Pr as before, as well
as this new parameter, Gr

In practice though, any significant Re will dominate

over the natural convection and therefore, the
problem will be described by the Grashof number and
the Prandtl number, the product of which is given
another name,

This parameter characterizes both the ratio of

buoyancy forces to viscous forces, and the relative
scale of the thermal and viscous boundary layers.
We can expect then that correlations for free
convection will be functions of Ra.

The Raleigh number characterizes the flow regime in

free convection exactly as did the Reynolds number in
forced convection.

A note on convection correlations in general.

Often (way too often) people express experimental
results in terms of non-dimensional parameters and
calculate the exponents such as ‘n’ above. They then
use these ‘n’ values to declare for example that the
flow is laminar or turbulent, or some other physical
interpretation. This is very often wrong! The heat
transfer process depends strongly on the nature of
the flow, and the physics is almost completely
removed once we get to a correlation.