Convective Heat Transfer

So far we focused our attention on heat transfer by conduction and considered convection only to the extent that it provided a possible boundary condition for conduction problems. In Chapter 1, the term “convection” was used to describe energy transfer between a surface and a fluid moving over the surface. In convection heat transfer, although the mechanism of diffusion (random motion of fluid molecules) contributes to energy transfer, the dominant contribution is generally due to the bulk or gross motion of the fluid elements. Our interest in this chapter is to get ourselves introduced with the physical mechanism that causes convection heat transfer and the means to perform convective heat transfer calculations.