A comparative numerical study of shell and multi-tube heat exchanger performance with different baffles configurations

Abstract

This study presents a numerical modeling of a shell and tube heat exchanger to analyze six various baffle configurations for increasing the thermal parameters performance and hydraulic parameters performance. The baffle configurations include conventional single segmental (CSS), staggered single segmental (SSS), Flower segmental (FS), hybrid segmental (HS), circular ring baffle (CR), and circular ring with holes (CRH) baffles. Flow of water field characteristics, pressure loss, and heat transfer performance, including effectiveness (ε) and the heat transfer coefficient (h) are studied with a variation of Reloads numbers from 10500 to 38500 to analyze the best performance. The effectiveness and the heat transfer coefficient increase with increasing the Reynolds numbers. The HS configuration results are the largest shell side pressure loss while HS and CR thermal influence on heat exchanger performance augmentation is found to be more significant compared to other configurations for all test cases. Compared to the CSS and SSS baffle configurations, the dead spaces and the recirculation zones are disappearing in both FS and HS configurations where the RCH is superior in overcoming the dead zones completely. The maximum values of the effectiveness and heat transfer coefficient of STHX are achieved in the case of CRH type with enhancement about 166% and 142% respectively, compared to CSS baffle. The CRH accomplished less friction losses than hybrid and ring baffles where the shell side pressure drop for HS was the highest value. The heat transfer coefficients per pressure loss of the RCH are about 138% higher than that of other configurations.