Impact of Convective Heat Transfer on Circular Tube Components in Polar Ships Within Ice-Covered Regions

The upper facilities of polar marine equipment face severe freezing risks in ice-covered regions, necessitating energy-efficient electric heat tracing design. Existing models neglect coupled environmental factors (temperature–wind–humidity), leading to the overestimation of heating power. In this paper, experiment and CFD simulation are used to study the change of convective heat transfer coefficients of electric tracing circular tube components under the polar coupling environmental conditions of wind speed of 0~8 m/s, temperature of −40~0 °C, and air relative humidity of 10~95%, and the corresponding mathematical prediction model is established. The results show that increasing the wind speed and relative humidity will both increase the convective heat transfer coefficient of the circular tube, while the temperature is inversely proportional to the convective heat transfer coefficient of the circular tube. The convective heat transfer coefficient shows an average growth rate of only 2.8–3.8% as the temperature decreases from −10 °C to −40 °C, which is significantly lower than the effects of wind speed (average growth rate 59–50%) and humidity (average growth rate 7.5–12.7%). When the wind speed exceeds 2 m/s, the growth rate of humidity’s effect on the coefficient increases from 17.82% to 33.96%. Mathematical prediction models can provide certain references for the calculation and design of reasonable heating amounts for anti-icing and de-icing of polar equipment’s circular tube components under ice-covered regions.