Question

if a horizontal heated plate is divided up into sections, starting from the leading edge, which section would experience the greatest amount of heat transfer ?

Answer 1

For horizontal heated plate whichever section has the highest amount of local convective heat transfer coefficient will experience the greatest amount of heat transfer.

For horizontal heated plate, there are total 3 regions over the entire plate :-

1. laminar region

2. transition region

3. turbulent region

local heat transfer coefficient decreases with the incresing distance from the leading edge. for laminar region 'h' is drecreased a factor of x^-0.5 and for transition region is starts to increase and reaches the highest value at the end of the transition region or we can say it reaches the highest value when flow becomes fully turbulent.

In turbulent region ' h ' is drecreased by a factor of x^-0.2 and it continues to drecreasing till the end of the plate.

so highest heat transfer would be exprienced by the section which lies in fully turbulent region and which have shortest distance from leading edge that means section from which turbulent region starts.

feel free to drop comment if you have any doubt.