Biot number

The Biot number (Bi) is a dimensionless quantity used in heat transfer calculations, named for the eighteenth-century French physicist Jean-Baptiste Biot (1774–1862). The Biot number is the ratio of the thermal resistance for conduction inside a body to the resistance for convection at the surface of the body. This ratio indicates whether the temperature inside a body varies significantly in space when the body is heated or cooled over time by a heat flux at its surface.

In general, problems involving small Biot numbers (much smaller than 1) are analytically simple, as a result of nearly uniform temperature fields inside the body. Biot numbers of order one or greater indicate more difficult problems with nonuniform temperature fields inside the body.

The Biot number appears in a number of heat transfer problems, including transient heat conduction and fin heat transfer calculations.