Nusselt number

In thermal fluid dynamics, the Nusselt number (Nu, after Wilhelm Nusselt^: 336) is the ratio of convective to conductive heat transfer at a boundary in a fluid. Convection includes both advection (fluid motion) and diffusion (conduction). The conductive component is measured under the same conditions as the convective but for a hypothetically motionless fluid. It is a dimensionless number, closely related to the fluid's Rayleigh number.^: 466

A Nusselt number of order one represents heat transfer by pure conduction.^: 336 A value between one and 10 is characteristic of slug flow or laminar flow. A larger Nusselt number corresponds to more active convection, with turbulent flow typically in the 100–1000 range.

A similar non-dimensional property is the Biot number, which concerns thermal conductivity for a solid body rather than a fluid. The mass transfer analogue of the Nusselt number is the Sherwood number.