HEAT TRANSFER IN SLENDER FINS USING BOUNDARY INTEGRAL EQUATION ANALYSIS

Abstract

Their narrow aspect ratio and the presence of reentrant corners make the numerical analysis of heat transfer within fins relatively difficult. This generally results in a far finer discretization being employed than is required to represent the variation of temperature and heat flux over the surface. Employed here is a modified version of the boundary integral equation (BIE) technique, which evaluates all the required integrals analytically and explicitly identifies and treats separately the components of the coefficients on either side of singularities such as corners. It is shown that both very thin fins and fins exhibiting high Biot numbers can be analyzed very accurately, with computational costs some orders of magnitude lower than those incurred using other techniques.