The Convective Heat Transfer

Sara Batool

October 17, 2017

1 Convection boundary layers
The concept of boundary layers is central to the understanding of convection
heat and mass transfer between a surface and a fluid flowing past it. In this
section, velocity, thermal, and concentration boundary layers are described, and
their relationships to the friction coefficient, convection heat transfer coefficient,
and convection mass transfer coefficient are introduced.
There are three types of convective boundary layers.

The velocity boundary layer

The thermal boundary layer
The concentration boundary layer

1.1 The Velocity Boundary Layer

To introduce the concept of a boundary layer, consider flow over the flat plate.
When fluid particles make contact with the surface, their velocity is reduced
significantly relative to the fluid velocity upstream of the plate, and for most
situations it is valid to assume that the particle velocity is zero at the wall1 .These
particles then act to retard the motion of particles in the adjoining fluid layer,
which act to retard the motion of particles in the next layer, and so on until, at a
distance y= from the surface, the effect becomes negligible. This retardation of
fluid motion is associated with shear stresses acting in planes that are parallel
to the fluid velocity,as shown in the figure below.

Figure 1: The velocity boundary layer of plane surface

With increasing distance y from the surface, the x velocity component of the
fluid, u, must then increase until it approaches the free stream value.

1 when fluid molecules or particles continually collide with and are reflected from the surface.

The momentum of an individual fluid particle will change in response to its collision with the
surface. This effect may be described by momentum accommodation coefficients. We assume
that nano- and microscale effects are not important, in which case the assumption of zero
fluid velocity at the wall is valid.