Journal of Engineering Mathematics. 41 (4):329-344, December 2001.
P.G. Daniels and J.T. Ratnanather
Thermal wall jets may be found in a variety of applications in geophysics, physiology and electronics, to name but a few. The thermal field of a separating wall jet is studied for a range of values of the Prandtl number of the fluid. The structure of the jet near the point of separation is described by a free interaction in which the fundamental problem is to solve the boundary-layer equations in a viscous sublayer close to the wall. Analytical and numerical solutions are found for the thermal field within the sublayer for the case of a wall at a fixed temperature. In particular, the wall heat transfer is obtained and effects of upstream influence within the thermal field are discussed. The large Prandtl number limit is considered in detail and it is shown that the main variation of the thermal field occurs within a region in the immediate neighbourhood of the point of separation. An upstream-downstream iterative method is used to obtain a numerical solution for this thermal field.