The mechanism of natural convection around horizontal and vertical heated microwires in silicon oil is studied by using the wire itself for temperature measurement. The comparison between present measured Nusselt numbers and those in literature shows that the present data agreed better with those of Tsubouchi than those of Fand. The horizontal microwire presents a larger Nu than the vertical one at low Rayleigh number. However

all of these experimental Nu are much larger than the numerically simulated values. In order to give a theoretical explanation on this phenomenon

heated microwire with weak vibration was used in the numerical simulations. The simulated Nu shows a perfect match with the measured data and are in agreement with the correlation of Tsubouchi with a deviation less than 5%. Therefore

an enhanced heat transfer mode due to weak wire vibration is proposed

to fill the gap between simulated and experimental results.