Asee peer logo

Numeric Tolerances in Online Learning Management Platforms: A Case Study in Heat Transfer

Download Paper |

Conference

2024 South East Section Meeting

Location

Marietta, Georgia

Publication Date

March 10, 2024

Start Date

March 10, 2024

End Date

March 12, 2024

Page Count

8

DOI

10.18260/1-2--45550

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/45550

Download Count

9

Request a correction

Paper Authors

biography

David Calamas Georgia Southern University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0001-6133-095X

visit author page

David Calamas is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Southern University. He received a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Clemson University and an MS and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from The University of Alabama.

visit author page

Download Paper |

Abstract

The Nusselt number physically represents the enhancement in heat transfer through a fluid layer due to convection relative to conduction. However, the Nusselt number is often thought of as a dimensionless heat transfer coefficient in undergraduate heat transfer curricula. To obtain a value for the convection heat transfer coefficient, students must select an appropriate Nusselt number correlation. Unfortunately, in undergraduate heat transfer textbooks, as many as five Nusselt number correlations are presented for fully developed turbulent flows in smooth tubes. Furthermore, the Nusselt number correlations often have the same, or similar, Reynolds and Prandtl number criteria. Therefore, there may be more than one appropriate Nusselt number correlation for any given problem. An excess of appropriate Nusselt number correlations is problematic when evaluating student work in online learning management systems because numeric tolerances are often too small to account for variations in Nusselt numbers. For example, there is a 96.9 % difference between the minimum and maximum Nusselt numbers obtained for a Reynolds number of 1E6 and a Prandtl number of 100. So, it is possible for a student to both choose an appropriate correlation and be marked as incorrect due to the numeric tolerance of the online learning management system.

Calamas, D. (2024, March), Numeric Tolerances in Online Learning Management Platforms: A Case Study in Heat Transfer Paper presented at 2024 South East Section Meeting, Marietta, Georgia. 10.18260/1-2--45550

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2024 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015