Laminar Condensation Heat Transfer on a Horizontal Cylinder

Abstract

A boundary-layer analysis is made for laminar film condensation on a horizontal cylinder. The formulation includes both the inertia forces and energy convection terms, which are neglected in Nusselt’s simple theory. A similarity transformation, valid over most of the cylinder, is found which reduces the partial differential equations of the problem (the conservation laws) to ordinary differential equations. Numerical solutions of the resulting ordinary differential equations are available for the Prandtl number range from 0.003 to 100. Heat-transfer results are presented and discussed.