Sherwood number

The Sherwood number  Sh (after Thomas Kilgore Sherwood ) is a dimensionless number of thermodynamics to describe the mass transfer , which u. a. is applied in chemical macrokinetics .

It describes the ratio of the amount of substance effectively transferred to the amount of substance transported by pure diffusion :

${\displaystyle Sh={\frac {\beta \cdot L}{D}}}$

With

• ${\displaystyle \beta }$= Mass transfer coefficient
• ${\displaystyle L}$= characteristic length
• ${\displaystyle D}$= Diffusion coefficient .

Since there is an analogy between mass and heat transfer , the structure of the Sherwood number is similar to the Nusselt number , which describes convective heat transfer .