Comparison of Heat Transfer rates for Water and Ethylene Glycol mixtures for Diesel engine exhaust gas heat recovery using Shell and Tube Heat Exchanger.

Abstract

Most of the researchers have claimed that high compression engines (diesel engines) are performing slightly above of 1/3rd of their potential and remaining heat energy is wasted in the form of exhaust gas. Efforts are going on to improve the design of these engines and investigations are being carried out to recover this waste energy from exhaust gases and utilize for different applications.In the present work, initially water is used as a heat exchange medium for three different loads on diesel engine viz., 50%, 60% and 70%, which extracts heat energy to evaluate the exhaust heat attainable from exhaust gases of the engine. The exhaust gas is passed through the tube side of the heat exchanger which is obtained from an exhaust manifold of a four stroke single cylinder diesel engine. Water is passed through the shell side of the shell and tube heat exchanger. Later this work is repeated for two different cooling medium i.e. water-ethylene glycol mixtures with 25% and 50%. The results are compared for 60% engine load conditions. The counter flow type heat exchanger arrangement is considered for the analysis. The temperatures were recorded for hot gases and cold medium at inlet and outlet points of the shell side and tube side flow. Heat calculations are carried out for each combination and detailed in the result–discussion and conclusion chapter. The objective of this work is to assess the exhaust gas heat recovery capacity using the ethylene glycol-water mixture and come out with a mixture for higher heat recovery capacity. This work is undertaken with segmental baffle heat exchanger of zero degree inclination. Also the work is repeated for inclined baffle heat exchangers of 10-degree and 20-degree baffle inclination to assess the effectiveness of liquid in recovering the heat from exhaust gases. It is observed that the water and Ethylene glycol mixtures have performed satisfactorily in all three baffle setups showing only 1.5% - 2.0% less heat recovery when compared with only water.