Experimental investigation on convection heat transfer characteristics of flat plate under environmental wind condition

ABSTRACT

By establishing wind tunnel and employing electrical heating method, the heat transfer characteristics of flat plate were investigated under environmental wind condition. Both the uniform and linear heat flux boundary conditions were adopted for comparison purpose. Besides, the impacts of heat flux q_wm, tilt angle α and wind incidence angle θ on heat transfer were explored in cases of windward and leeward facing positions. The local convection heat transfer coefficient h_cx and average convection Nusselt number Nu_cm were obtained. The results show that, when α is small, there are two maximum values of h_cx under linear heat flux boundary condition. As for Nu_cm, differences between the two boundary conditions seem indistinctive. At windward orientation, Nu_cm is not sensitive to α. While for leeward orientation, Nu_cm has a rapid decline progress with the increasing α, which indicates the tilt angle α is an important parameter to affect the heat transfer of plate. Finally, new correlations of Nu_cm have been developed, which were proven effective in engineering applications.

KEYWORDS:

• Convection heat transfer
• environmental wind condition
• experimental study
• flat plate
• uncertainty analysis

Acknowledgments

This work is supported by Open Fund of Key Laboratory of Low-grade Energy Utilization Technologies and Systems (Chongqing University), Ministry of Education of China (Project No. LLEUTS-2016005). The authors also wish to thank the support from Chongqing Graduate Student Research Innovation Project (Project No. CYB14044).