Conjugate Forced Convection Heat Transfer From a Heated Flat Plate of Finite Thickness and Temperature-Dependent Thermal Conductivity

In this paper, a conjugate forced convection heat transfer from a good conducting plate with temperature-dependent thermal conductivity is studied. The semi-analytical solution for the nonlinear integro-differential equation occurring in the problem is handled easily and accurately by implementing the differential transform method (DTM). The horizontal plate is heated with uniform heat flux at the lower surface while being cooled at the upper surface under laminar forced convection flow. A numerical approach is also performed via a finite-volume method to examine the validity of the results obtained by DTM. The results of DTM show closer agreement with the results of the numerical method than the results obtained by the perturbation method existing in the literature. It is concluded that for a good conducting plate with a finite thickness the distribution of the conjugate heat flux at the upper surface is significantly affected by the plate thickness. Moreover, we conclude that in the conjugate heat transfer case the temperature distribution of the plate is flatter than the one in the nonconjugate case.