Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2022) 137: 215
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-022-02430-2

Regular Article

Experimental study of geometric cuboid effect on convective heat transfer

Department of Mechanical Engineering, Razi University, Kermanshah, Iran

^b veysi_farzad@yahoo.com

Received: 1 September 2021
Accepted: 28 January 2022
Published online: 8 February 2022

Abstract

The building energy simulation (BES) models are extensively used to predict heat loads in buildings. Despite its significance, however, the geometric cuboid effect on the convective heat transfer coefficient (CHTC) is yet to be considered in the BES models. In this paper, effects of height, width, length, and angle of attack of a cuboid and also the effect of air speed on the CHTC were experimentally studied to highlight unreliability of the models ignoring the cuboid geometry. For this purpose, a total of 16 experiments were designed using the Taguchi’s design of experiments (DOE), where the considered factors were varied at 4 levels. The percent contribution of each factor to the output variable was determined by the analysis of variance (ANOVA), indicating the significance of all geometric factors when it came to the CHTC. The linear regression analysis was further performed to define a linear correlation for predicting the overall CHTC under different geometric conditions. Accordingly, two nonlinear correlations were developed for the cuboid geometry and one correlation was obtained for building applications, by which one could predict average Nusselt number (Nu).