Comment on 'Computational Modeling and Experiments of Natural Convection for a Titan Montgolfiere'

摘要

Despite reporting useful computational modeling and experiments, Samanta et al. [1] incorrectly apply the empirical Nusselt-Rayleigh correlation of Scanlan et al. [2] for free (natural) convective heat transfer between concentric spheres. They attribute the correlation used in their Eq. (19) to a private communication with J. Jones (2009). However, Jones took this correlation from Holman's well-known text [3] (also see earlier editions), which incorrectly quotes the scale length used by Scanlan et al. [2], Perpetuation of this error will lead to significant differences in predicted heat transfer rates and deserves to be highlighted to prevent similar recurrence.