It is argued that the heat transfer between a roughened surface and a stream of incompressible fluid flowing over it is dependent on both the viscosity and thermal conductivity of the fluid even when the roughness is large enough for viscosity to have ceased to affect the skin friction.

Concentrating on closely spaced roughness, sufficiently large for the skin friction to be independent of Reynolds number, a simple model is constructed of the flow near the surface. It consists of horseshoe eddies which wrap themselves round the individual excrescences and trail unsteadily downstream; the eddies are imagined to scour the surface and thereby to transport heat between the surface and the more vigorous flow in the neighbourhood of the roughness crests. Taken in conjunction with Reynolds analogy between temperature and velocity distributions in the fluid away from the surface, the model leads to an expression for the rate of heat transfer which contains a function of the roughness Reynolds number and the Prandtl number of the fluid whose detailed form is found by appeal to the limited experimental data available. An order-of-magnitude argument suggests that the functional form established empirically is consistent with the assumed model of the flow close to the surface.

The object of the work is to establish a basis for the analysis of experimental data and for their extrapolation with respect to Reynolds number and Prandtl number.