HEAT TRANSFER FROM

EXTENDED (FINNED) SURFACES

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When the temperatures Ts and T are fixed by design considerations,
there are two ways to increase the rate of heat transfer: to increase
the convection heat transfer coefficient h or to increase the surface
area As.
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• Increasing h may require the installation of a
pump or fan,
• Or replacing the existing one with a larger one
• The alternative is to increase the surface area
by attaching to the surface extended surfaces
called fins
• made of highly conductive materials such as
aluminum
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 Common Assumptions for Fins
• Finned surfaces are commonly used in practice to
enhance heat transfer
• In the analysis of fins, we consider steady
operation with no heat generation
• in the fin, and we assume the thermal
conductivity k of the material to remain constant.
• We also assume the convection heat transfer
coefficient h to be constant
• and uniform over the entire surface of the fin for
convenience in the analysis.

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 Fin Equation

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•Equation 3–56 is a linear, homogeneous, second-order
differential equation with constant coefficients.
•A fundamental theory of differential equations states that
such an equation has two linearly independent solution
functions
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 •Fins are not likely to be so long that their temperature
approaches the surrounding temperature at the tip.
•A more realistic situation is for heat transfer from the
fin tip to be negligible since the heat transfer from the
fin is proportional to its surface area,
•and the surface area of the fin tip is usually a negligible
fraction of the total fin area.
• Then the fin tip can be assumed to be insulated,

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 A practical way of accounting for
the heat loss from the fin tip is to
replace the fin length L in the
relation for the insulated tip case
by a corrected length defined as

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 Fin Efficiency

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 Efficiency of
circular,
rectangular,
and
triangular
fins on a
plain surface
of width w

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Efficiency of circular fins of length L and constant thickness t

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•fins with triangular and parabolic profiles contain less material and
are more efficient requiring minimum weight
•An important consideration is the selection of the proper fin length L.
•increasing the length of the fin beyond a certain value cannot be
justified unless the added benefits outweigh the added cost.
•The efficiency of most fins used in practice is above 90 percent

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 The performance of the fins
is judged on the basis of the
enhancement in heat transfer
relative to the no-fin case

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 Proper Length of a Fin
determination of the appropriate
length of the fin once material and
cross section are specified.

it should offer a good compromise

between heat transfer performance
and the fin size.

assume the fin temperature varies in

one direction only

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 3-7 HEAT TRANSFER IN COMMON
CONFIGURATIONS
• So far, we have considered heat transfer in
simple geometries
• such as large plane walls, long cylinders, and
spheres.
• approximated as one-dimensional, and simple
analytical solutions
• in practice; two- or three-dimensional and
complicated geometries no simple solutions
are available
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