A New Forward Model Approach for a Mild Steel Fin under Natural Convection Heat Transfer

This paper reports the correlation for temperature of the mild steel fin which is subjected to heat flux at its base. The study is performed on a two dimensional, steady state and laminar flow model. The numerical model is restricted to natural convection and the fluid under consideration is air. A rectangular mild steel fin (250 mm x 150 mm x 6 mm), aluminium base plate (250 mm x 150 mm x 8 mm) and an extended geometry representing the ambient air condition is modelled and simulated using ANSYS 14.5. Grid independence study is carried out to fix the number of grids in order to find the optimum number of nodes for carrying out simulations. The heat flux (q) at the bottom of the base plate is varied to study temperature distribution, surface heat transfer coefficient (h) and velocity profile of the flow in the boundary layer around the fin. All these parameters are studied by inclining the model at various angles. A multiple regression analysis is carried out to obtain correlation for the temperature in terms of angle of inclination and the heat flux. The main objective of the work is, proposing a model for the estimation of heat flux or heat transfer coefficient from the fin thereby reducing the computational cost of the forward model in the field of inverse heat transfer.