摘要：Needs for buoyancy driven ventilation appear in a variety of engineering applications, ranging from cooling of electronic components to cooling of nuclear reactor fuel elements. Hence, it becomes crucial to optimize the natural convection heat transfer as far as possible. If the fins are properly designed, they become very attractive for these applications since they offer an economical, trouble-free solution to the problem. This paper reports an experimental and numerical study of natural convection heat transfer from rectangular fin arrays on a vertical base. An experimental set-up was constructed and calibrated; six sets of fin-arrays and a base plate without fins were tested in atmosphere. A correlation was presented relating the convection heat transfer rate of fin arrays relative to that for base plate without fins with the relevant non-dimensional parameters. In order to improve the natural convection heat transfer rate, air gap was used for the optimum fin spacing.
关键词：Natural convection; experimental optimization; air gap; rectangular fin arrays
