Laminar Natural Convection Heat Transfer From a Horizontal Circular Cylinder to Liquid Metals

The objective of the present study is to clarify the heat transfer characteristics of natural convection around a horizontal circular cylinder immersed in liquid metals. Experimental work concerning liquid metals sometimes involves such a degree of error that it is impossible to understand the observed characteristics in a measurement. Numerical analysis is a powerful means to overcome this experimental disadvantage. In the present paper we first show that the Boussinesq approximation is more applicable to liquid metals than to ordinary fluids and that the present analysis gives accurate heat transfer rates, even for a cylinder with a relatively large temperature difference (>100 K) between the heat transfer surface and fluid. It is found from a comparison of the present results with previous work that the correlation equations that have already been proposed predict values lower than the present ones.