Convection

Convection in the most general terms refers to the movement of currents within fluids (i.e. liquids, gases and rheids).

Convection is one of the major modes of Heat and mass transfer. In fluids, convective heat and mass transfer take place through both diffusion – the random Brownian motion of individual particles in the fluid – and by advection, in which matter or heat is transported by the larger-scale motion of currents in the fluid. In the context of heat and mass transfer, the term "convection" is used to refer to the sum of advective and diffusive transfer.

A common use of the term convection relates to the special case in which the advected (carried) substance is heat. In this case, the heat itself often causes the fluid motion, while also being transported by it. In this case, the problem of heat transport (and related transport of other substances in the fluid due to it) may be more complicated.