ABSTRACT
The published work relating to fluid flow confined between two horizontal walls has been concentrated on predominantly forced convection flow (Burns and Parkes, 1967; Sorenson and Stewart, 1974; Sobey, 1980; Stephanoff et al., 1980; O’Brien and Sparrow, 1982; Tsangaris and Leiter, 1984; Nishimura et al., 1984, 1985, 1986, 1990; Amano, 1985; Amano et al. 1987; Asako and Faghri, 1987; Asako et al., 1988; Garg and Maji, 1988; Rubin and Himansu, 1989; Ali and Ramadhyani, 1992; Saniei and Dini, 1993; Taneda and Vittori, 1996; Yang et al., 1997; Metwally and Manglik, 2000; Muley et al., 2002, 2006; Manglik et al., 2005) of constant property Newtonian fluids only. Two types of channels have been considered, each having frequent changes in crosssection — 1) symmetric and 2) asymmetric. In the following subsections, an outlook on the existing research work in these flow situations is presented.
