Air natural convection between inclined parallel plates with uniform heat flux at the walls

Air natural convection between inclined parallel plates with uniform heat flux at the walls is frequently met in many technical applications, such as thermal control of electronic equipments. This review article presents authors' investigations into three open ended channel configurations, which model actual electronic systems with heat-dissipating components at the walls. The article describes experiments and numerical studies in symmetrically and asymmetrically heated inclined channels. Utterly as well as discretely heating at the walls have been taken into account. The effects of the channel gap, of the inclination angle, of the walls emissivity, of the dissipated heat flux, of the number and the location of the discrete heat sources along the walls are reported. Another configuration is the one obtained by placing an insulated plate either downstream or upstream of a symmetrically utterly heated vertical channel. The effects of the length, the width and the placement of the extension on the thermal performance have been highlighted. Numerical predictions for the three aforedescribed configurations in vertical symmetrically heated channel have been derived.