Heat Transfer Engineering

Chapter 6: Natural convection

Abstract

In this chapter, we introduce the idea of a convective flow arising naturally from self-induced forces. These could be due to either temperature or concentration gradients. We then focus our attention on natural convection arising from temperature gradients. Following the presentation of introductory ideas, the ubiquitous problem of natural convection over a vertical flat plate is taken up for a detailed analysis. The governing equations of fluid flow and heat transfer that are strongly coupled with the addition of body force terms are then simplified using boundary layer theory, and following this, the pertinent dimensionless parameters governing the problem, namely the Grashof and Rayleigh numbers, are ...