Natural Convection Along a Vertical Wavy Surface

Abstract

A transformation method is applied to study the natural convection along irregular vertical surfaces. A sinusoidal surface is used as a specific example to demonstrate the advantages of the transformation method, and to elucidate the heat transfer mechanism near such surfaces. The numerical results show that the frequency of the local heat transfer rate is twice that of the wavy surface. The amplitude of the oscillating local Nusselt number gradually decreases downstream where the natural convection boundary layer grows thick.