Nusselt number in heat transfer

(b. Nuremberg, Germany, 25 November 1882; d. Munich, Germany, 1 September 1957), heat transfer, thermodynamics.

Nusselt was the first significant contributor to the subject of analytical convective heat transfer.

He completed his schooling at a time when the problems of heating and cooling in the increasingly high performance power equipment of the early twentieth century finally demanded accurate analysis.

Sieder-tate equation

For a century Fourier’s mathematical theory of heat conduction in rigid media had provided the only analytical attack on the problem, but it was inadequate to predict the heat flux in a flowing fluid. In 1915 Nusselt cut the Gordian knot.

Although analytical solutions to the appropriate fluid-flow equations were so intrinsically complicated that they had to await the more fundamental work of others, Nusselt used dimensional analysis to show, in a single stroke, the functional form that such solutions would have to take.

He thus made it possib