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The overall heat transfer coefficient is a measure of the overall ability of a series of conductive and convective barriers to transfer heat. It is commonly applied to the calculation of heat transfer in heat exchangers , but can be applied equally well to other problems.
Newton's law of cooling (in the form of heat loss per surface area being equal to heat transfer coefficient multiplied by temperature gradient) can then be invoked to determine the heat loss or gain from the object, fluid and/or surface temperatures, and the area of the object, depending on what information is known.
The heat transfer rate can be written using Newton's law of cooling as = (), where h is the heat transfer coefficient and A is the heat transfer surface area. Because heat transfer at the surface is by conduction, the same quantity can be expressed in terms of the thermal conductivity k:
describes heat transfer across a surface = Here, is the overall heat transfer coefficient, is the total heat transfer area, and is the minimum heat capacity rate. To better understand where this definition of NTU comes from, consider the following heat transfer energy balance, which is an extension of the energy balance above:
Q is the exchanged heat duty , U is the heat transfer coefficient (watts per kelvin per square meter), A is the exchange area. Note that estimating the heat transfer coefficient may be quite complicated. This holds both for cocurrent flow, where the streams enter from the same end, and for countercurrent flow, where they enter from different ends.
This coefficient accounts for the time lag between the outdoor and indoor temperature peaks. Depending on the properties of the building envelope, a delay is present when observing the amount of heat being transferred inside from the outdoors. The CLF is the cooling load at a given time compared to the heat gain from earlier in the day. [1] [5]
Formulas and correlations are available in many references to calculate heat transfer coefficients for typical configurations and fluids. For laminar flows, the heat transfer coefficient is usually smaller than in turbulent flows because turbulent flows have strong mixing within the boundary layer on the heat transfer surface. [6]
Heat is the flow of thermal energy driven by thermal non-equilibrium, so the term 'heat flow' is a redundancy (i.e. a pleonasm). Heat must not be confused with stored thermal energy, and moving a hot object from one place to another must not be called heat transfer. However, it is common to say ‘heat flow’ to mean ‘heat content’. [1]