Actually, convective cooling is what fans do. It's pretty intuitive by looking only at the word. Convection, wherein "vect" referring to "vector" thereby implies movement. (Vectors are directions of movement if you don't know that.)
Yeah it's confusing because technically conduction is how heat transfers into a medium such as air, and convection is how the medium responds or is directed (by fans).
If you go into astronomy then you'll understand more easily. Convection occurs all the time in the vacuum of space, if it didn't, the sun would overheat and explode. It's true, the sun radiates an absolute **** ton of energy nonstop in its corona (temperature millions of degrees centigrade). It also blows it off as solar wind and photons. If it didn't, it would have gone supernova a long time ago and probably burned a hole in the universe or something insane... Anyway, end of story, the sun heats the earth via convection. It's a lot less confusing if you realize that because its literally energy transferred across a distance in a straight line via some particles. AKA a vector. ConVECTion.
You....jesus.
You've bastardized everything.
Convective energy transfer is when two masses of different temperature mix, and because they interact they will come to a new average. Think about this as if it were an oven, where the CONVECTION oven mixes very hot air from around a coil with relatively cool air to create an area of relatively high temperature. This is not about vectors...and the fact that you somehow BS'd this definition together makes me ask if you are a troll or are genuinely requiring me to speak with smaller words. Convection requires the mixing of fluids...
Conduction is the energy of one surface transferring to another surface. It assumes that things are in contact...like a fluid flow and a tower blade. It conducts heat from point A with higher potential to point B with lower potential. It's...jesus...it's basically all that you consider unless in a vacuum or mixing fluids because "heat" is simply random kinetic energy and we model the universe as a series of atoms...which is kind of like saying energy transfers outward from any point of concentration.
Radiation is what happens when energy is emitted from a black body. Before you somehow make that racist, it's a body that absorbs all energy and emits energy based on radiating it as energy levels shift. IE, imagine a lump of Carbon. It has certain atomic energy level storage. When excited (heated up), it emits only certain radiation spectral, as electrons fall from excited to ground state. This is why you get things like tungsten filament and sodium lights emitting different colors, despite both taking in electricity and converting it into visible light and heat. Again, really crappy process to transfer energy...which is why the sun can be millions of degrees hot for hundreds of thousands of years...turn Venus into a lava world, and Mars can be a frozen landscape despite being nearly a twin of Earth but just a little bit farther on orbital radius.
Now, let me de-stupid your comments about the sun. It is...absolutely idiotic. Convective currents on the sun exist. This is because the plasma, a fluid, moves and swirls. A charged particle field (plasma) moving induces magnetic fields, which can cause things like eruptions of plasma. This is the regular process which will create extremely strong magnetic fields, which may cause coronal mass ejections. These CMEs cause solar flares, because something the size of Earth composed of plasma has a bunch of energy associated with it. CMEs, when pointed at Earth, have enough energy to generate a stream of charged particles. Said stream interacts with the magnetic field of the planet, potentially distorting it and causing electromagnetic distortions...and this children is the Northern Lights. During particularly high solar activity, the voltage induced by the charged particle flow can overwhelm the magnetic field of our planet, dramatically increasing radiation exposure by allowing charged particles to permeate the atmosphere...and to even induce voltages in metals. This has happened in known history...stories of which include telegraphs operating without external power sources, and metal items creating burns when their charged state grounds to something through flammable material...like human flesh.
The solar wind is not about blowing off photons....because photons have no charge. They by definition are packets of radiation...which do not have mass. They are also constantly emitted by the sun...because photons are light, and the sun RADIATES light constantly as the excited state of smashing hydrogen into helium allows excited electrons to step down from highly excited to just excited...
For the record, sun radiates heat. Photons strike objects. Objects radiate what they do not absorb, and what they absorb excites their energy state. If object is a fluid, and is surrounded by other fluid, then this creates convection currents which try to even out the energy of the system. Think the weather...with our atmosphere being heated on one side and not the other... If the photon strikes something solid, like say your car, it cannot mix into the surrounding, so it conducts the random kinetic energy out into the world.
If you want to be even more simple, radiation is so bad at heating that it's cooler under an apple tree's shade than in direct sunlight. Convection is so crap at retaining and transferring heat that a 20 second blast of air can cool your car from 100+ degrees and stifling to breathable...but if you sit your butt down on that seat even after the blast of air you'll wind up with flesh fused to pleather because the 20 seconds of air did nothing to cool the 120 degree seat...but you sitting there raised your butt from 98.6 degrees to 108 so fast that it smells like burning bacon.
I'm going to math at you one last time so you can get the magnitude of how stupid your statements are.
Q = σ * ε * A * T^4 (equation for radiation energy transfer)
σ - Boltzmann constant, (5.67 x 10^-8 W/m²K^4)
ε - Emissivity, between o (perfect reflector), to 1 (perfect black body)
A - surface area of source
T - Temperature, based on 0 being absolute zero.
Note that Radiation only transfers energy at any real rate when your temperature is really high...because 10^-8 is really small.
Q = h * A * (Ts - Tf) (equation for convective energy transfer)
h - convective heat transfer coefficient....which is highly variable based on fluid flow
A - surface area of source
Ts - surface temperature of source
Tf - fluid temperature
Note that this is not a great way to conduct heat...because it only works fluid to surface...and is based on how fluid is mixing.
Q = k * A * (dT/dx) (equation for conductive energy transfer)
k - thermal conductivity
A - surface area of source
dT/dx - temperature gradient from source to environment
Do you get it? Let me help. k is material based. No requirements for mixing, just 1:1 performance. dT/dx is also 1:1, where the difference in temperatures directly changes the energy transfer rate. If you start from the assumption that the fan can always push air of a known temperature...which most computer coolers should assume unless they want to heat up a room, then you only have to meet air flow over the fins to demonstrate how much energy you transfer.
This is why your convection oven cooks a Turkey in hours, your conduction based pan cooks an egg in minutes, and the sun gives you a skin burn after a few hours...despite falling into said sun would evaporate you before you could stand on its surface. The fact that I have to explain basic heat transfer, while you want to bemoan specifications on fans, has me questioning whether you should be allowed to hold any silverware more dangerous than a soup spoon...for your own safety.
Last little bit...because. I'm going to ask you why there are convective currents in space. I think maybe you mistake the magnitude of things because you cannot wrap your brain around the numbers here. There are filaments and strands of matter between spatial bodies...that scientist have recently managed to quantify. It was an insane amount of matter, which inductively you'd assume was huge. Unfortunately, inductive reasoning is not good reasoning. Things like these filaments and things like the Kuiper belt are really really huge. One million pounds of matter, over 1 trillion cubic units of space is 1 pound per million units of space...which is nearly zero....but that's way more than a vacuum and if you have a trillion trillion units of space then it's going to be a lot. Your brain might not register that as being huge, but the math definitely proves it.
You've managed to bastardize English, attempt to rewrite the definition of words based on a third grade level understanding of them, and all of this in service to pretending you know everything about fans. Could you kindly shut up with the demands, and educate yourself, before you act like some savant? I mean, unless you're 13 and this is the "I want to test boundaries, and know everything because I know something" phase then you've managed to have me question whether you're a troll or a hallucinating AI...and at this point I'm leaning to the 13 year old. Convection being about vectors is a hilariously stupid grasp. One second on Google would have told you this was pants on head stupid...and vectors being how energy transfer is...wow.
Reading topics:
Entroy
Maxwell's demon
Basic thermodynamics
A dictionary printed in the last 200 years
STP...what it means and why it matters
....anyone who will ask you "if convection is about vectors, then why isn't conduction about ducting"...literally, anyone....
