Speaker
Description
In 1928, André Lévêque defended his PhD thesis in Paris. Its title was Les Lois de la Transmission de Chaleur par Convection - The Laws of Convective Heat Transfer - and it was published that same year in Annales des Mines, the famous French mining engineering journal. Lévêque's contribution was a new way to think about how heat moves across a thin layer of fluid close to a wall. Lévêque is sometimes credited with solving a thermal boundary-layer problem. This is not exactly true.
André Lévêque seems to have been the first to think about the transition from surface to freestream temperature across a very thin region close to the surface. He observed that in this region, the most important fluid velocities change linearly with normal distance from the surface. Lévêque's solution was specific to heat transfer into a Poiseuille flow. In this type of flow, fluid velocity is a function of normal distance from the wall only; it does not change with streamwise location.
In 1953, Schuh showed how to apply this idea to boundary-layers, modifying Lévêque's solution so that the wall tangent became a function of streamwise location. Kestin and Persen come to this idea independently, outlining with clarity the solution that Schlichting describes in Boundary-Layer Theory.
This solution, of the thermal boundary-layer equation for flows of large Prandtl number, appears to be Kestin and Persen’s, not Lévêque’s.
