NUMERICAL STUDY OF THE NATURAL CONVECTIVE COOLING OF A VERTICAL PLATE

We study numerically in this paper the natural convective cooling of a vertical plate. The full transient heat conduction equation for the p late, coupled with the natural convection boundary layer equations are solved numerically for a wide range of the parametric space. Assuming a large Rayleigh number for the natural convection flow, the balance equations are reduced to a system of three differential equations with three parameters: the Prandtl number of the fluid, Pr, a non-dimensio nal plate thermal conductivity alpha and the aspect ratio of the plate epsilon. The nondimensional cooling time depends mainly on alpha/epsi lon(2), obtaining a minimum of this time for values of 1 much greater than alpha much greater than epsilon(2).