1

MEL301 Heat and Mass Transfer I.I.T - Ropar

1
st
Semester 2014-15
Tutorial Sheet #4
(This is a Draft Version. Some more questions may be added but none will be removed, so you
may start solving these one-by-one)

General Instructions:
1. Deadline to submit this assignment: To be announced
2. Study and revise Chapter-4 (Transient Heat Conduction) from the textbook.
3. The thermal properties of various materials can be obtained from the several tables given in the Appendix of the
textbook
4. While solving problems in this course draw the system/control volume boundary and follow rest of the procedure
mentioned in the class (identification of problem, governing equations, assumptions etc.), where applicable.

PRACTISE PROBLEMS (These problems are for practice, no need to submit them however each student must solve ALL
these problems themselves)
1) Read and analyze all the solved examples of this chapter from the textbook

2) Consider a sphere and a cylinder of equal volume made of copper. Both the sphere and the cylinder are initially
at the same temperature and are exposed to convection in the same environment. Which do you think will cool
faster, the cylinder or sphere? Why?

3) In what medium is the lumped system analysis more likely to be applicable: in air or in water? Why?

4) To warm up some milk for a baby, a mother pours milk into a thin - walled glass whose diameter is 6-cm. The
height of the milk in the glass is 7-cm. She then places the glass into a large pan filled with hot water at 70
o
C.
The milk is stirred constantly, so that its temperature is uniform at all times. If the heat transfer between the
water and glass is 120 W/m
2
K, determine how long it will take for the milk to warm up from 3
o
C to 38
o
C. Take
the properties of the milk to be the same as those of water. Can the milk in this case be treated as a lumped
system? Why? Repeat this problem for the case of water also being stirred, so that the heat transfer coefficient
is doubled to 240 W/m
2
K.

5) Can the transient temperature charts in Fig. 4-16 for a plane wall exposed to convection on both sides be used
for a plane wall with one side exposed to convection while the other side is insulated? Explain.

PROBLEMS (These must be submitted)
1) Consider a 800-Watt iron whose base plate is made of 0.5-cm-thick aluminium alloy 2024-T6 (=2770 kg/m
3
,
c
p
= 875 J/KgK, = 7.310
-5
m
2
/s). The base plate has a surface area of 0.03 m
2
. Initially, the iron is in thermal
equilibrium with the ambient air at 22
o
C. Taking the heat transfer coefficient at the surface of the base plate to
be 12 W/m
2
K and assuming 85% of the heat generated in the resistance wires is transferred to the plate,
determine how long it will take for the plate temperature to reach 140
o
C. Is it realistic to assume the plate
temperature to be uniform at all times?


2) Consider a spherical shell satellite with outer diameter of 4 m and shell thickness of 10 mm is re-entering the
atmosphere. The shell satellite is made of stainless steel with properties of = 8238 kg/m
3
, c
p
= 468 J/kgK and k
= 13.4 W/mK. During the re-entry the effective atmosphere temperature surrounding the satellite is 1250
o
C
with convection heat transfer coefficient of 130 W/m
2
K. If the initial temperature of the shell is 10
o
C,
determine the shell temperature after 5 minutes of re-entry. Assume heat transfer occurs only on the satellite
shell.

2

3) An electronic device dissipating 18 Watts has a mass of 20 gm, a specific heat of 850 J/kgK, and a surface area
of 4 cm
2
. The device is lightly used, and is on for 5 minutes and then off for several hours, during which it cools
to the ambient temperature of 25
o
C. Taking the heat transfer coefficient to be 12 W/m
2
K, determine the
temperature of the device at the end of the 5 minutes of operating period. What would your answer be, if the
device were attached to an aluminum heat sink having a mass of 200 gm and a surface area of 80 cm
2
? Assume
the device and the heat sink to be nearly isothermal.

4) A long roll of 2-m-wide and 0.5-cm-thick 1-Mn manganese steel plate coming off a furnace at 820
o
C is to be
quenched in an oil bath (c
p
= 2.0 kJ/kgK) at 45
o
C. The metal sheet is moving at a steady velocity of 20 m/min,
and the oil bath is 9m long. Taking the convection heat transfer coefficient on both sides of the plate to be
860W/m
2
K, determine the temperature of the sheet metal when it leaves the oil bath. Also, determine the
required rate of heat removal from the oil to keep the temperature constant at 45
o
C.

5) A watermelon initially at 35
o
C is to be cooled by dropping it into a lake at 15
o
C. After 4h and 40 min of cooling,
the centre temperature of watermelon is measured to be 20
o
C. Treating the watermelon as a 20-cm diameter
sphere and using the properties k = 0.618 W/mK, = 0.1510
-6
m
2
/s, = 995kg/m
3
and c
p
= 4.18 kJ/kgK,
Determine the average heat transfer coefficient and the surface temperature of watermelon at the end of the
cooling period.

6) An exothermic process occurs uniformly throughout a 10-cm-diameter sphere (k = 300 W/mk, c
p
= 400 J/kgK,
= 7500kg/m
3
), and generates heat at a constant rate of 1.2 MW/m
3
. The sphere initially is at a uniform
temperature of 20
o
C, and the exothermic process is commenced at time t = 0. To keep the sphere temperature
under control, it is submerged in a liquid bath maintained at 20
o
C. The heat transfer coefficient at the sphere
surface is 250 W/m
2
K.
Due to high thermal conductivity of sphere, the conductive resistance within the sphere can be neglected
in comparison to the convective resistance at its surface. Accordingly, this unsteady heat transfer situation
could be analyzed as a lumped system.
(a) Show that the variation of sphere temperature T with time t can be expressed as dT/dt = 0.5 0.005T
(b) Predict the steady state temperature of the sphere.
(c) Calculate the time needed for the sphere temperature to reach the average of its initial and final
(steady) temperatures.