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

Abstract A systematic theoretical investigation of the effects of fin spacing, fin height, fin length and temperature difference between fin and surroundings on 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 simulations were made for cases reported in the literature. After obtaining a good agreement with results from the literature a large number of runs were performed for a detailed parametric study. It has been shown that it is not possible to obtain optimum performance in terms of overall heat transfer by only concentrating on one or two parameters. The interactions among all the design parameters must be considered. Results are presented in graphical form together with optimum values and correlations, and compared with available experimental data from the literature.