Development of Convective Heat Transfer Experiment for Integration into the Undergraduate Curriculum

Abstract "Existing commercial educational experiments can be rather expensive. The objective of this paper is to present the development of a low cost educational convective heat transfer experiment for integration into the undergraduate curriculum. The paper will discuss the experimental set-up assembly and how to develop the convective heat transfer correlations using non-dimensional parameters. In addition, uncertainty error analysis will be demonstrated to teach the accuracy of the developed experimental convective heat transfer correlation as it is compared to the correlation from the textbook. The experimental assembly used an existing simple wind tunnel plus electrically heated cylindrical stainless-steel rod. The heating rod was easily adjustable to allow for swift removal for other experiments to be conducted and easy insertion into the wind tunnel. Thermocouples were used to measure the surface and fluid temperatures using a thermocouple readout. The ammeter and voltmeter were used to control the voltage and current of the heating rod. The overall assembly was safe, easy to follow, and cost effective. "