Consider a hot dog being cooked in boiling water in a pan. Would you model the heat transfer to the hot dog as one-, two-, or three-dimensional? Would the heat transfer be steady or transient? Also, which coordinate system would you use to solve this problem, and where would you place the origin? Explain.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Heat transfer to a hot dog can be modeled as two-dimensional since temperature differences (and thus heat transfer) will exist in the radial and axial directions (but there will be symmetry about the center line and no heat transfer in the azimuthal direction. This would be a transient heat transfer process since the temperature at any point within the hot dog will change with time during cooking. Also, we would use the cylindrical coordinate system to solve this problem since a cylinder is best described in cylindrical coordinates. Also, we would place the origin somewhere on the center line, possibly at the center of the hot dog. Heat transfer in a very long hot dog could be considered to be one-dimensional in preliminary calculations.