Internal Convection: Correlations and Enhancements — Lesson 2

Solar collectors use solar thermal energy to heat up water to provide a hot water supply to residential and commercial buildings. This eliminates the need of using electricity or fossil fuels used by conventional boilers. The efficiency of the system relies on the internal forced convection mechanism of heat transfer to properly heat up the water while it flows through the tubes.

The heat transfer due to forced convection is also very important in chemical processes. For example, a condenser uses a liquid running through a coiled tube to cool down and condense a gas flowing around it. The coiled shape of the tube is used to enhance the heat transfer between the two fluids.

In this lesson, we will learn how to estimate the heat transfer coefficient for calculating the total convective heat transfer in internal flows and explore designs to enhance it.

Alternate video link.

Here are the accompanying handout slides for the lesson.