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The Nusselt number is the ratio of total heat transfer (convection + conduction) to conductive heat transfer across a boundary. The convection and conduction heat flows are parallel to each other and to the surface normal of the boundary surface, and are all perpendicular to the mean fluid flow in the simple case.
The characteristic length is the ratio of the plate surface area to perimeter. If the surface is inclined at an angle θ with the vertical then the equations for a vertical plate by Churchill and Chu may be used for θ up to 60°; if the boundary layer flow is laminar, the gravitational constant g is replaced with g cos θ when calculating the ...
The Sherwood number (Sh) (also called the mass transfer Nusselt number) is a dimensionless number used in mass-transfer operation. It represents the ratio of the total mass transfer rate ( convection + diffusion) to the rate of diffusive mass transport, [ 1 ] and is named in honor of Thomas Kilgore Sherwood .
Forced convection can occur in both laminar and turbulent flow. In the situation of laminar flow in circular tubes, several dimensionless numbers are used such as Nusselt number, Reynolds number, and Prandtl number. The commonly used equation is =.
In convective heat transfer, the Churchill–Bernstein equation is used to estimate the surface averaged Nusselt number for a cylinder in cross flow at various velocities. [1] The need for the equation arises from the inability to solve the Navier–Stokes equations in the turbulent flow regime, even for a Newtonian fluid .
For laminar flow, the three different moment cases all give similar values for the thermal boundary layer thickness. For turbulent flow, the thermal boundary layer can be divided into a region near the wall where thermal diffusion is important and an outer region where thermal diffusion effects are mostly absent.
A schematic diagram of the Blasius flow profile. The streamwise velocity component () / is shown, as a function of the similarity variable .. Using scaling arguments, Ludwig Prandtl [1] argued that about half of the terms in the Navier-Stokes equations are negligible in boundary layer flows (except in a small region near the leading edge of the plate).
The Nusselt number is most useful in determining the convective heat transfer coefficient, whereas the Biot number is used in unsteady problems. This is a typical exam question. The " k {\displaystyle k} " in the Biot numer is of a solid, that in the Nusselt number of a fluid.