Conduction-Radial System

Source: Fundamentals of Heat and Mass

Transfer by Incropera & DeWitt

Conduction
Cylindrical systems often experience
temperature gradients in the radial direction
only and may therefore be treated as onedimensional.
The heat transfer rate for a cylinder is as
follows:

and
with usual notations

Source: Fundamentals of Heat and Mass

Transfer by Incropera & DeWitt

 Consider a cylinder with hot fluid flowing inside the cylinder

and cold fluid outside the cylinder:

the conduction heat transfer rate qr (not the heat flux ) is a constant in the
radial direction.
Source: Fundamentals of Heat and Mass
Transfer by Incropera & DeWitt

Now consider a composite Consider a cylinder with hot fluid

flowing inside the cylinder and cold fluid outside the cylinder:

Source: Fundamentals of Heat and Mass

Transfer by Incropera & DeWitt

The insulated pipe

 an important application of the radial-flow result is to

heat transfer through the walls of pipes and other
cylindrical objects. Normally, we need to find is the heat
transfer from fluid flowing along the pipe. However ,the
case of a lagged pipe is of particular interest, since
effective use of insulation is crucial to energy
conservation. Therefore, the following have to be
considered:
1. Convective heat transfer from the inner fluid to the inner
wall of the pipe.
2. Conduction through the wall of the pipe.
3. Conduction through a layer of insulation around the pipe.
4. Convection and radiation from the outer surface.

Consider a pipe wall made up of two annular layers with differing

conductivities and of unit length of this system. Heat passes
through the several layers at the same rate

 The convective heat transfer rate from fluid to pipe is

The conduction through the wall of the pipe is

The conduction through the lagging is

And the heat transfer due to convection from the outer surface is

 The result derived above provides a useful

insight into the effectiveness of the lagging
applied to pipes. It might be supposed that
the provision of more insulation would always
reduce the heat loss, but this turns out not to
be so. This is because the outer area from
which heat is transferred increases as the
insulation is made thicker.

 To simplify , we ignore the internal convective

resistance and the resistance of the (usually metallic)
wall of the pipe itself. The figure is now reduced as
shown below to find the critical thickness of insulation

Therefore, the heat transfer rate is

Differentiate with respect to ro