Progress in the thermal sciences: AIChE Institute Lecture

Rather than merely surveying progress in the prediction of heat transfer over the past half century, attention is focused on the factors that have led to significant advances in understanding and practice. An almost one-to-one correspondence is demonstrated between advances in heat transfer and those in computer hardware and software. However, the development of specialized algorithms for flow and heat transfer by individual investigators appears in most cases to be an essential ingredient. Direct contributions of experimentation are relatively minor, but the synergy of combined experimentation and numerical analysis is most often the key to discovery and innovation. A quiet revolution has occurred in the form of correlative equations, and the primary and almost sole contribution of closed-form analysis has been the derivation of asymptotes for that purpose. Finally, progress in heat transfer has occurred primarily in discrete steps, and most often as a consequence of exploratory research and/or the observation and pursuit of the explanation for an anomaly.