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In fluid dynamics, the Nusselt number is the ratio of convective to conductive heat transfer at a boundary in a fluid. Convection includes both advection and diffusion. The conductive component is measured under the same conditions as the convective but for a hypothetically motionless fluid. It is a dimensionless number, closely related to the fluid's Rayleigh number.
A Nusselt number of value one represents heat transfer by pure conduction. A value between one and 10 is characteristic of slug flow or laminar flow. A larger Nusselt number corresponds to more active convection, with turbulent flow typically in the 100–1000 range. The Nusselt number is named after Wilhelm Nusselt, who made significant contributions to the science of convective heat transfer.
A similar non-dimensional property is the Biot number, which concerns thermal conductivity for a solid body rather than a fluid. The mass transfer analogue of the Nusselt number is the Sherwood number,