Natural convection from an array of horizontal rectangular thick fins with short length

In this article numerical study is made to predict natural convection from an array of aluminum horizontal rectangular thick fins of 3 mm < t < 7 mm with short lengths (L ⩽ 50 mm) attached on a horizontal base plate. The three-dimensional elliptic governing equations of laminar flow and heat transfer were solved using finite volume scheme. For 128 fin geometries, typical results have been compared with available experimental data from the literature and good accuracy were observed. Based on the verified model, fluid flow and thermal structure around various fins were illustrated and two types of flow patterns in the channel of the fin arrays were observed. Effect of various fin geometries and temperature differences on the convection heat transfer from the array was determined for Rayleigh numbers based on fin spacing of 192–6784 and applied correlations are developed to predict Nusselt numbers with corresponding non-dimensional parameters.