Heat transfer by natural convection from an array of short, wall-attached horizontal cylinders

Per-cylinder natural convection Nusselt numbers were measured for an in-line array of short horizontal cylinders that were affixed to a convectively participating vertical plate. The effect of cylinder length-to-diameter ratio, intercylinder spacing, position at which the cylinder is attached to the vertical plate, and Rayleigh number were investigated. The experiments were performed in air. It was found that the extent to which a given cylinder in the array was affected by cylinders situated below it depended on the Rayleigh number, with enhanced heat transfer coefficients being more likely at higher Rayleigh numbers. Greater enhancement occurred at larger intercylinder spacings. The qualitative characteristics of the Nusselt number results were insensitive to the cylinder length-to-diameter ratio, but the longer cylinders exhibited higher values of the Nusselt number. For the most part, the Nusselt numbers for the wall-attached horizontal cylinders fell below those for the classical horizontal cylinder of infinite length.