HEAT TRANSFER THROUGH THE LAMINAR BOUNDARY LAYER ON A CIRCULAR CYLINDER IN AXIAL INCOMPRESSIBLE FLOW

This paper presents a method of calculating the distribution of rate of heat transfer into a laminar incompressible boundary layer from the exterior surface of a long thin circular cylinder, when the surface of the cylinder is maintained at a constant tem-perature and the flow is parallel to the cylinder axis; the temperature difference between the surface and the main stream is taken to be small enough to neglect buoyancy effects. A series solution, valid for small downstream distances from the nose, has been obtained already by Seban, Bond, and Kelly. This is now extended by deriving an asymptotic series solution, valid at large downstream distances, and bridging the gap between these two series solutions by an approximate solution, based on the method used recently by Davies and Bourne to calculate heat transfer from a flat plate. The calculation is used to demonstrate the effect of curvature and of Prandtl number on the local rate of heat transfer at various downstream distances by comparing with the corresponding flat plate results. 1