Flow and Heat Transfer in Ducts of Arbitrary Shape With Arbitrary Thermal Boundary Conditions

Abstract

A computation-oriented method of analysis is presented for determining closed-form solutions for fully developed laminar flow and heat transfer in ducts of arbitrary cross section. The analytical method can accommodate both uniform and circumferentially varying thermal boundary conditions. The solutions provide information for local quantities such as the velocity and the temperature distributions as well as for overall quantities such as the friction factor and the Nusselt number. As an application of the method, solutions are presented for flow and for heat transfer in ducts of circular-segment cross section, a configuration that is of current interest in space technology.