LOCALLY FULLY-DEVELOPED LAMINAR FREE-CONVECTION WITHIN ASYMMETRICALLY HEATED VERTICAL CHANNEL

The present study is concerned with the thermal characteristics of free convection in the locally fully developed region within vertical channels. Similar to that in the well-known internal convection channel flow, the flow field may include entrance region and fully developed region simultaneously as channel is long enough. For locally fully developed region, velocity distribution and Nusselt number as well as generalized temperature profiles in terms of bulk mean temperature are carried out analytically by solving the momentum and energy equations. The existence of locally fully developed region is then confirmed numerically with the solutions for developing flow at far downstream. Results for three different combinations of thermal boundary conditions on the respective wall surfaces (i.e. isothermal-isothermal, isoflux-isothermal), and isoflux-isoflux) are provided to extensively illustrate the substantial influences of heating conditions with closed-form expressions.