Axial heat conduction effects in natural convection along a vertical cylinder

Abstract

Many transport cases occur in nature and in industrial applications in which the transfer of heat is governed by the process of natural convection. Natural convection arises in fluids when the temperature changes cause density variations leading to buoyancy forces. An excellent review of natural convection flows has been given by Ede. Recently, Minkowycz and Sparrow, Cebeci, and Aziz and Na [S] have studied the steady, laminar, incompressible, natural convection flow over a vertical cylinder using a local nonsimilarity method, a finite-difference scheme, and an improved perturbation method, respectively. However, they did not take into account the effect of axial heat conduction for small Prandtl number. It is known that the axial heat conduction effect becomes important for low-Prandtl-number fluids such as a liquid metal.