Free convection in vertical eccentric annuli with a uniformly heated boundary

The paper utilizes a boundary-layer model in bipolar coordinates to study the developing laminar free convection in vertical open-ended eccentric annuli with one of the boundaries uniformly heated while the other boundary is cooled and kept isothermal at the ambient temperature. This model has been solved numerically using finite-difference techniques. Results not available in the literature are presented for a fluid of Prandtl number 0.7 in an annulus of radius ratio 0.5 for three values of the dimensionless eccentricity, namely, 0.1, 0.5 and 0.7. These results include the developing velocity profiles and the pressure along the annulus, the channel heights required to naturally induce different flow rates and the variation of the total heat absorbed by the fluid with the channel height.