Natural Convection Heat Transfer Coefficients for a Short Horizontal Cylinder Attached to a Vertical Plate
Experiments were performed to investigate the natural convection heat transfer characteristics of a short isothermal horizontal cylinder attached to an equi-temperature vertical plate. The apparatus was designed so that the cylinder could be attached to the plate at any one of three positions along the height of the plate. Two cylinders were employed (one at a time) during the course of the experiments, one of which had a length equal to its diameter while the other had a length that was half the diameter. At each attachment position and for each cylinder, the Rayleigh number (based on the cylinder diameter) ranged from 1.4 × 104 to 1.4 × 105. It was found that the interaction of the flat plate boundary layer with the cylinder brought about a reduction of the cylinder Nusselt number relative to that for the classical case of the long isolated horizontal cylinder without end effects. The respective deviations of the Nusselt numbers for the shorter and longer of the participating cylinders from the literature correlation for the isolated cylinder were twenty percent and ten percent. At a given Rayleigh number, the cylinder Nusselt number was quite insensitive to the position of the cylinder along the plate, with the typical data spread due to height being in the 5–7 percent range. The Nusselt number was also rather insensitive to cylinder length, showing a ten percent increase as the length-diameter ratio was increased from one-half to one.