Heat transfer at high energy devices with prescribed cooling flow

We study the heat transfer from a high‐energy electric device into a surrounding cooling flow. We analyse several simplifications of the model to allow an easier numerical treatment. First, the flow variables velocity and pressure are assumed to be independent from the temperature which allows a reduction to Prandtl's boundary layer model and leads to a coupled nonlinear transmission problem for the temperature distribution. Second, a further simplification using a Kirchhoff transform leads to a coupled Laplace equation with nonlinear boundary conditions. We analyse existence and uniqueness of both the continuous and discrete systems. Finally, we provide some numerical results for a simple two‐dimensional model problem. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.