Summary

In this course, we learned about forced convection. We introduced some parameters of interest such as the local and average heat transfer coefficients and the Nusselt number to describe the physics of convection. We recapped the hydrodynamic boundary layer and formulated the laminar and turbulent boundary layer equations to derive the temperature distribution in a thermal boundary layer. We also learned about various dimensionless numbers that are important in external forced convection problems. This laid the necessary foundation for solving external forced convection over a heated flat plate for laminar, transitional and turbulent flow regimes. We obtained Nusselt number correlations under isothermal and constant wall heat flux conditions for both laminar and turbulent boundary layer flows. In the final lesson, this heat transfer analysis was extended to other external forced convection problems involving cross-flow over a cylinder, flow across tube-banks, and a jet flow impinging on a flat plate. We discussed correlations that help understand the Nusselt number variation with the flow Reynolds number for these external flows.