Transient heat transfer to a fluid sphere suspended in an electric field

Abstract The unsteady heat transfer to a droplet suspended in an electric field is numerically investigated, for the case where the bulk of the resistance is in the droplet. It was found that, like the case of a translating droplet, there is a maximum steady-state Nusselt number. In this case, for a stationary drop in an electric field, the maximum steady Nusselt number was found to be about 30. An alternating direction implicit scheme was employed to integrate the energy equation. The range of interior Peclet numbers investigated, based on the maximum velocity in the droplet, was from 5 to 2000.