Numerical study of the natural convective cooling of a vertical plate

Abstract

We study numerically in this paper the natural convective cooling of a vertical plate. The full transient heat conduction equation for the plate, 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-dimensional plate thermal conductivity alpha and the aspect ratio of the plate epsilon. The nondimensional cooling time depends mainly on alpha/epsilon(2), obtaining a minimum of this time for values of 1 much greater than alpha much greater than epsilon(2).