NATURAL CONVECTION HEAT TRANSFER FROM

A HOLLOW HORIZONTAL CYLINDER WITH

EXTERNAL LONGITUDINAL FINS: A NUMERICAL
APPROACH

Sumitted by:
Manish Singh
19ME62R26
 STUDY
• The present work deals with a thorough investigation of the natural convection heat transfer from a hollow as well as
solid externally finned horizontal cylinder in a laminar range

• The present work also captures the flow physics in terms of the velocity vector and the temperature contour along with a
reliable analysis of the heat transfer characteristics of Nu, effectiveness, and efficiency of the finned cylinder

• For the present simulations, full three-dimensional Navier–Stokes and energy equations have been solved to compute
the flow field parameters in the computational domain.
 
• Three-dimensional heat conduction equation is solved in the solid geometry (fin) to determine the temperature
distribution inside the fin material.
 
• For externally finned solid and hollow cylinder in this we Study of Effect of fin spacing, fin height, length of the cylinder
and Ra on the following

a) Effectiveness
b) heat transfer rate
c) Nusselt number
d) flow and temperature
e) finned cylinder efficiency
 PARAMETERS

• Effect of Rayleigh number (Ra), L/D, H/D, and s/D on heat transfer from the finned cylinder have been investigated
where the input parameters are varied in a wide rangeof

104 < Ra <107, Ra Rayleigh number based on diameter of the cylinder

0.5<L/D<5, L/D length to diameter ratio
0.0833<H/D<2, H/D fin height to diameter ratio
0.0785<s/D<0.785 s/D fin spacing to diameter ratio

• Fin thickness to diameter ratio is kept fixed at 0.01262 for all the simulations where fin height to diameter ratio and
fin number is varied from 0.0833 to 2 and 4 to 40, respectively.

• Highly conductive aluminum fins with a constant thermal conductivity of 198 W/m-K are employed longitudinally on
the external surface of the cylinder which is placed inside a surrounding domain for the numerical simulations to be
performed
 STEPS
• ASSUMPTION FOR MATHEMATICAL MODELING
a) fluid around the cylinder has been assumed to be incompressible.
b) To account for the buoyancy effect around the fins Boussinesqtype approximation has been used.
c) all the thermophysical properties of the fluid and solid are assumed to be constant at the film temperature.

• BOUNDARY CONDITION
a) The cylinder surface and the fin base which is in contact with the fluid are given as wall condition where the
velocity normal to it and tangential to it is set to be zero.
b) The temperature at these surfaces are set to be constant wall temperature Tw.
c) All the six surfaces of the outer rectangular domain are set to be at the atmospheric pressure or zero gauge
pressure.
d) At the fin–air interface the condition for heat flux and temperature continuity should be satisfied.

• The equations have been solved using Finite volume method in a multi grid solver of ANSYS Fluent with the
appropriate boundary conditions.
• Number of cells and computational domain were decided based on grid independent and domain
independence test.
• In the present study, three cases have been simulated and validated with the experimental results obtained
by Kim et al.
 RESULT
A thorough numerical solution of the flow and temperature field around the finned cylinder has been conducted from where
the following conclusions can be arrived at:
• Fin effectiveness of both isothermal horizontal solid and hollow cylinder with external longitudinal fins increases with
respect to fin number (N) and fin height (H).

• The outer surface heat transfer from a solid and hollow cylinder increases with increase in fin number and fin height,
however, the inner surface heat transfer from a hollow cylinder reduces slightly with increases in number of fins for all Ra
and L/D.

• The heat transfer from the outer surface of a hollow cylinder is lesser than that of a solid cylinder for L/D of 0.5 and H/D of
0.0833 at Ra _106 for all s/D.

• For H/D of 2, the heat transfer rate from the outer surface of the hollow cylinder is almost equal to that of the solid cylinder
except at s/D¼0.0785(N¼40).

• Average surface Nusselt number for both the solid and hollow cylinder decreases with increase in fin number (N) for all Ra,
L/D and H/D.

•  Nu increases with increase in Ra and decreases with increase in L/D for all H/D and s/D.

•  Nu of a solid cylinder is marginally higher than that of the hollow cylinder for all L/D, Ra, s/D and H/D.