Natural Convective Heat Transfer from an Inclined Isothermal Fin Array

Abstract

In the present study, laminar natural convection from an inclined isothermal fin array is computationally performed. The numerical results are presented for representative values of the parameters illustrating the system geometry, such as dimensionless fin spacing (S* = 0.3, and 0.5), and dimensionless clearance (C* = 0.10, 0.25, and 0.40), Grashof number (Gr = 1.8 × 105 and 8.64 × 105), and channel’s inclination angle (α = 30° and 45°). At each value of α, the axial distribution of various flow quantities such as the bulk temperature and the local Nusselt number has been reported. Furthermore, the overall heat transfer characteristics for each geometric parameter have been discussed. It is observed that an increase in inclination angle from 30° to 45° increases the overall Nusselt number value by about 20–45%. A Kriging-based response surface is also provided for Nu to get a robust prediction with a range of input parameters (0.1 ≤ C* ≤ 0.4, 0.3 ≤ S* ≤ 0.5).