Natural Convection Cooling of a Vacuum Flask

Application ID: 1448


The following example solves a pure conduction and a free-convection problem in which a vacuum flask holding hot coffee dissipates thermal energy. The main interest is to calculate the flask's cooling power; that is, how much heat it loses per unit time.

This tutorial model treats the natural convection cooling with two approaches:

  1. Using heat transfer coefficients to describe the thermal dissipation
  2. Modeling the buoyancy-driven flow of air outside the flask to describe the convective cooling

This model example illustrates applications of this type that would nominally be built using the following products: