Distribution characteristics of gas-liquid mixture in spiral-wound heat exchanger under sloshing conditions

Abstract

Spiral-wound heat exchangers (SWHEs) are the important equipment for the industry development, however, the non-uniformity of flow medium in the shell side seriously decreases their heat transfer performance. The maldistribution is more critical when SWHEs are used in the floating production storage & offloading system (FPSO) and this restricts the application of SWHEs in the FPSO system. To make SWHEs more suitable for the FPSO, it is necessary to study their distribution performance of gas-liquid mixture under sloshing conditions. A novel distributor named “tubes distributor” was designed and a gas-liquid two-phase experimental bench was built to process the investigation via air and water as the mediums. The influence of sloshing amplitude, sloshing period and sloshing form was investigated. The results show that the increase of heave amplitude makes the two-phase distribution performance better which is in contrast with that in roll condition. At the same time, the increasing pitch angle results in the better gas uniformity and worse liquid uniformity. Different from sloshing amplitude, the longer sloshing periods lead to the worse two-phase distribution uniformity. It is also got that roll condition can provide the worse two-phase distribution performance under complex practical offshore sloshing condition than the experimental condition.