Natural convective heat transfer from a heated horizontal surface directly exposed to a liquid into which vertical fins, attached to a cooled horizontal surface, project vertically downwards has been numerically studied. It has been as sumed that the flow is steady, laminar and two-dimensional. The governing equations have been written in terms of dimensionless variables and have been solved using the finite element procedure. The solution has the following parameters: the Rayleigh number, the Prandtl number, the dimensionless half-width e.e. the ratio of the half-distance between the fins to the liquid depth, the dimensionless gap between the bottom of the fin and the lower surface. and the ratio of the thermal conductivity of the fin material to that of the liquid. Because of the application being considered, the Prandtl number has been taken as 5. Solutions have been obtained for Rayleigh numbers of between 10 and 1,000,000 for dimensionless half-widths of between 1 and 0.2 for thermal conductivity ratios of 20,10 and 4 for a range of dimensionless fin gaps and widths.
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