Forced Convection Heat Transfer Around an Isothermal Sphere for Low Prandtl Numbers
摘要
A numerical investigation is performed to analyze forced convection for steady, laminar, incompressible, symmetric, and viscous flow around an isothermal sphere using the central difference scheme (CDS) with Pseudo time iterative technique. Pseudo time iterative approach converts the Penta-diagonal system obtained from the discretization of governing equations via CDS into two tri-diagonal systems in the spatial directions, which helps to do the computation smoothly even at finer grids. The properties of heat transfer and flow from a sphere are described in terms of the average or mean Nusselt number ( \(\overline{{{\text{Nu}}}}\) ), local Nusselt number ( \({\text{Nu}}\) ), and drag coefficient (CD). The parameters that are studied here are Reynolds numbers (Re) from 0.1 to 750 and five liquid metals whose Prandtl numbers (Pr) are 0.004 (liquid sodium), 0.014 (liquid Aluminium), 0.0208 (liquid Gallium alloy), 0.024 (liquid Mercury), 0.065 (liquid Lithium), and a Helium gas mixture with Pr = 0.1. The local and mean Nusselt number increase with an increment of Pr and Re. For the given value of Re, the Pr increases with the decrease of the thermal boundary thickness, resulting in the increment of the local and mean Nusselt number.