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Forced convection: when a fluid is forced to flow over the surface by an internal source such as fans, by stirring, and pumps, creating an artificially induced convection current. [3] In many real-life applications (e.g. heat losses at solar central receivers or cooling of photovoltaic panels), natural and forced convection occur at the same ...
A significant feature of the Cauchy equation and consequently all other continuum equations (including Euler and Navier–Stokes) is the presence of convective acceleration: the effect of acceleration of a flow with respect to space.
Convection is often categorised or described by the main effect causing the convective flow; for example, thermal convection. Convection cannot take place in most solids because neither bulk current flows nor significant diffusion of matter can take place. Granular convection is a similar phenomenon in granular material instead of fluids.
All convective processes also move heat partly by diffusion, as well. The flow of fluid may be forced by external processes, or sometimes (in gravitational fields) by buoyancy forces caused when thermal energy expands the fluid (for example in a fire plume), thus influencing its own transfer. The latter process is often called "natural convection".
Flux F through a surface, dS is the differential vector area element, n is the unit normal to the surface. Left: No flux passes in the surface, the maximum amount flows normal to the surface.
This mechanism is found very commonly in everyday life, including central heating and air conditioning and in many other machines. Forced convection is often encountered by engineers designing or analyzing heat exchangers, pipe flow, and flow over a plate at a different temperature than the stream (the case of a shuttle wing during re-entry, for example).
The convection–diffusion equation can be derived in a straightforward way [4] from the continuity equation, which states that the rate of change for a scalar quantity in a differential control volume is given by flow and diffusion into and out of that part of the system along with any generation or consumption inside the control volume: + =, where j is the total flux and R is a net ...
In convective heat transfer, Newton's Law is followed for forced air or pumped fluid cooling, where the properties of the fluid do not vary strongly with temperature, but it is only approximately true for buoyancy-driven convection, where the velocity of the flow increases with temperature difference.