Sunday, April 15, 2007

Free convection for dummies

The Nonoscience blog has a nice series of articles that serve as an introduction to the principles of free convection. You can find the posts here:

(i) Introduction to Free Convection
(ii) Mechanism of Free Convection
(iii) Free Convection and the Rayleigh Number

As for me, I'm still grappling to make sense of my heat transfer course. It's hard enough trying to get a physical grasp of all those dimensionless quantities1, and on top of that, my head's still reeling trying to figure out when to use all the empirical correlations2.


Notes

[1] - Nusselt, Rayleigh, Prandtl, Grashof, Richardson, apart from good old Reynolds and Archimidies. I could probably write a poem!

[2] - Churchill and Chu, you're exempt. But Dittus & Boelter, Sieder & Tate, Petukhov, Notter & Sleicher, I'm piping confused. And then there's Whitaker, Polhausen , ... I could go on & on

1 comment:

Mohan K.V said...

Heat transfer was one of the very good courses we had.. the most amazing part was, when we came back home and wikied the stuff we learnt in class, we came across amazing stuff like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-Scholes
which is related to the conduction equation, and, of course, the infinite amazing alleys of turbulence:
This guy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Kolmogorov
who worked on things as diverse as this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity
and
http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/fluid.html

:-)