Analysis of thermal performance of annular fins with variable thermal conductivity by homotopy analysis method

The homotopy analysis method (ham) is used to analyze the thermal performance of annular fins with temperature-dependent thermal conductivity. since the ham algorithm contains a parameter that controls the convergence and accuracy of the solution,its results can be verified internally by calculating the residual error. the ham solution appears in terms of algebraic expressions which are not only easy to compute but also give highly accurate results covering a wide range of values of the parameters rather than the small values dictated by the perturbation solution. in this work,the fin efficiency of nonlinear annular fins is obtained as a function of thermogeometric fin parameter,thermal conductivity parameter and radii ratio. the data from the present solutions is correlated for suitable ranges of problem parameters. the resulting correlation equations can assist thermal design engineers for designing of annular fins with temperature-dependent thermal conductivity. ©2008 tibtd printed in turkey.