Experimental study on heat transfer from rectangular fins in combined convection

Combined natural and forced convective heat transfer arise in many transport processes in engineering devices and in nature, which is frequently encountered in industrial and technical processes, including electronic devices cooled by fans, heat exchangers placed in a low-velocity environment, and solar receivers exposed to winds. In this study, the effects of design parameters have been experimentally investigated for the air-side thermal performance under combined (natural and forced)convection of the rectangular plate heat sinks, and the values of optimum design parameters were sought. Many ideas for improving cooling methods have been proposed, one of which is the heat sink. In this work, the average Nusselt number (Nu) and thermal resistance of a simple base rectangular plate and five vertical rectangular plate heat sinks with different numbers of fins under natural and combined convection were experimentally investigated to obtain the maximum average Nu and minimum thermal resistance for various Reynolds numbers (Re) from 2300 to 40000, Rayleigh numbers (Ra) from 1300000 to 13000000, and Richardson numbers (Ri) from 0.4 to 3. Also, in this experiment, fin spacing (P) was varied from 2.8 mm to 14.6 mm and the dimensionless P/H ratio was varied from 0.1 to 0.49. The flow velocity varied in the range of 2 to 8 m/s under combined convection. Based on the effects of Ri and Re, two empirical equations for natural and also for combined convection heat transfer were derived to calculate the average Nu. The average deviation for these two equations is about 7%.The outcomes of this research can be beneficial for engineers who work on electronics cooling systems.