Effects of transpiration and changing diameter on heat and mass transfer to spheres

Abstract

Abstract Mass transfer to spheres suspended in an agitated liquid has been studied both experimentally and theoretically. Finite‐difference solutions are obtained for mass transfer from a sphere to a fluid flowing past it in steady viscous flow. The effects of a transpiration velocity at the surface of the sphere and of a continuously changing sphere diameter are included. A normalized presentation of these effects is quite insensitive to the bulk flow Peclet number. When these theoretical corrections for transpiring and shrinking spheres are applied to the mass transfer data for ice spheres that are melting in an agitated brine bath, the corrected mass transfer coefficients are brought into agreement with a generalized correlation published elsewhere. This agreement suggests that the theoretical results apply, with reasonable accuracy, to a shrinking and transpiring sphere that is suspended in a turbulent liquid.