Lecture 32, March 24, 2004

• Apologies about the tutorial yesterday –

questions will be posted
• Reminder Quiz next Tuesday covers from the last
quiz up until intro to radiation (Friday/Monday)

Natural Convection Contd..

Consider a horizontal cavity heated from below (tau =

0o). It is the Raleigh number that we rely on to
characterize the flow regime, in comparison to the
Reynolds number in the case of forced convection.

Below RaL=1708, buoyant forces are not strong

enough to overcome viscous forces and there is no
convection. This means that NuL = 1, and heat
transfer is by conduction only.
The next flow regime is that of laminar roll cells. The
number of cells that develop can depend on many
things including the aspect ratio (H/L) of the
enclosure. Usually in this regime though, the roll cells
are almost circular with a diameter very near L.
Above RaL = 5e4 the regular cells break down and the
flow is turbulent inside the cavity.

Next consider a vertical cavity (tau = 90o). The aspect

ratio now becomes very important since the heated
fluid is carried all the way along the hot side of Length
H before turning and (cooling) along the opposite
side. The hotter this fluid gets before turning towards
the cool side, the less will be the heat transfer.
For RaL < 1000 flow is weak and heat transfer is very
close to conduction only. Refer to the text for the
appropriate correlations for the correct range of RaL.
As always be very careful not to use correlations
outside their range of applicability.

Let’s attempt to explore natural convection in the

window systems that we looked at way back in
chapter 3. At that time, we assumed that the air gaps
transferred heat by conduction only (Nu = 1).

First we need to look at several of the correlations

presented in your text.

And, for the lower aspect ratios,

Alternatively,

and for the lower aspect ratios,

These correlations are all out of your text and are

explained more therein.
The windows we considered were double and triple
pane windows with H = 0.8m. The gap width, L was
10mm for the double pane window and 3mm for the
triple pane window. This results in an aspect ratio H/L
= 80 for the double pane, and H/L=267 for the triple
pane window. We are clearly well above the range of
aspect ratios for all the correlations presented above.

Next we need to determine the Ra number in the

gaps, so that we can determine NuL and hence
complete a thermal resistance network. This should
be done at the average T for the enclosure, and again
we will approximate this with the total temperature
range. The average temperature is then 5oC, or
278K.

Properties

Air Argon

k = 0.0263 W/mK 0.0186 W/mK

mu = 2.27e-5 Ns/m2 1.85e-5 Ns/m2
rho=1.68 kg/m3 1.16 kg/m3
Pr = 0.633 0.707
alpha=2.19e-5 m2/s 2.25e-5 m2/s

Be very careful –we are outside the range of H/L for

these correlations. We predict NuL for the triple pane
window which are less than 1. This is very unphysical
and should be discarded immediately. The heat
transfer in the gaps of these triple pane windows will
be conduction only (Nu=1). Note that with natural
convection that Argon performs slightly worse than
air.

If you calculate the Nusselt number for the double

plane windows with blinds in the cavity which have a
spacing of 10mm, you find that NuL for the air filled
window increases to 4.55, and to 4.74 for the Argon
filled window. Essentially we have made many small
enclosures which are very effective at carrying heat
from the hot window to the cool window. We have
decreased the window performance by more than a
factor of 2!

Please read chapter 9, and notice the correlations for

such things as horizontal cylinders, plates, and for
cylindrical and spherical enclosures.