Fluid Flow and Heat Transfer Studies and Correlations for Mixed Convection with Conduction and Radiation from a Discretely Heated Vertical Plate

Abstract

The article provides the results and correlations pertaining to fluid flow and heat transfer for the problem of mixed convection with conduction and radiation from the fundamental geometry of a vertical plate heated discretely using three identical flush-mounted heat sources. The cooling medium considered is air. Fi nite volume method has been used to solve the governing continuity, Navier Stokes and energy equations without boundary layer approximations considered in stream function–vorticity form. A computational domain with 151 grids along and 111 grids across the plate has been chosen. The nature of variation of the local drag coefficient, mean friction coefficient, contributions to mean friction co efficient and plate heat dissipation from free convection, forced convection and radiation. A comparative study between uniformly and discretely heated vertical plate geometries for the identical net heat dissipation has been made. Based on a large set of 583 data generated from the computer code written for solving the present problem, correlations for non-dimensional maximum and average plate temperature and mean friction coefficient have been evolved