Suscripción a Biblioteca: Guest

ISSN Online: 2377-424X

ISBN Print: 1-56032-797-9

International Heat Transfer Conference 11
August, 23-28, 1998, Kyongju, Korea

THE BEGINNING OF THE STUDY OF CONVECTIVE HEAT TRANSFER: NEWTON'S EXPERIMENT

Get access (open in a dialog) DOI: 10.1615/IHTC11.920
pages 231-236

Sinopsis

Heat transfer textbooks generally refer to Newton's Law of cooling but they give no details of Newton's experiment (Newton, 1701), although reprintings and translations of his original paper are available.
The purpose of the first part of this paper is to give details of Newton's work. It is worth stressing that he did not write his law down in the form of an equation nor did he define or use the heat transfer coefficient.
The second part of the paper is an attempt to reconstruct Newton's transient cooling experiment using modern knowledge of heat transfer. It is necessary to allow for varying heat transfer coefficients and specific heats and hence a numerical approach has to be used on a computer. The output of the process is data for temperature versus time for the test section.
The next step is to take this simulated cooling time data and analyse it using the same method Newton used, to produce the same type of estimated temperatures that he obtained. By modern standards his estimates of the melting point of various metals were too low. It has been suggested that this was because the metals were impure but a purely heat transfer explanation is shown to be more plausible.