Parametric study of natural convection heat transfer from horizontal rectangular fin arrays

A systematic theoretical investigation of the effects of fin spacing, fin h eight, fin length and temperature difference between fin and surroundings o n the free convection heat transfer from horizontal Fin arrays was carried out. The three-dimensional elliptic governing equations were solved using a finite volume based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code, Preliminary s imulations were made for cases reported in the literature. After obtaining a good agreement with results from the literature a large number of runs we re performed for a detailed parametric study. It has been shown that it is not possible to obtain optimum performance in terms of overall heat transfe r by only concentrating on one or two parameters. The interactions among al l the design parameters must be considered. Results are presented in graphi cal form together with optimum values and correlations, and compared with a vailable experimental data from the literature. (C) 2000 Editions scientifi ques et medicales Elsevier SAS.