Free convective heat transfer in a viscous incompressible fluid confined between a long vertical wavy wall and a parallel flat wall

Abstract

Analyses of fluid flow over a wavy wall are of interest because of their applications to the physical problems mentioned in § 1. The authors have therefore devoted their attention to the effect of waviness of one of the walls on the flow and heat-transfer characteristics of an incompressible viscous fluid confined between two long vertical walls and set in motion by a difference in the wall temperatures. The equations governing the fluid flow and heat transfer have been solved subject to the relevant boundary conditions by assuming that the solution consists of two parts: a mean part and a disturbance or perturbed part. To obtain the perturbed part of the solution use has been made of the long-wave approximation. The mean (zeroth-order) part of the solution has been found to be in good agreement with that of Ostrach (1952) after certain modifications resulting from the different non-dimensionalizations employed by Ostrach and the present authors respectively. The perturbed part of the solution is the contribution from the waviness of the wall. The zeroth-order, the first-order and the total solution of the problem have been evaluated numerically for several sets of values of the various parameters entering the problem. Certain qualitatively interesting properties of the flow and heat transfer, along with the changes in the fluid pressure on the wavy and flat wall, are recorded in §§ 5 and 6.