Improving the efficiency of spiral heat exchanger based on pressure drop

Abstract

A Spiral Heat Exchanger (SHE) is a compact double-coiled heat exchanger with spiral tubing. It is widely known as one of the most efficient heat transfer systems. One of the issues observed on the SHE performance is that it has internal leakage defects from the mixing of the cold and hot fluids and gasket leakages due to an imbalance of pressure and temperature. Therefore, the aim of this project is to numerically analyze the parameters that affect the SHE performance using CFD numerical solutions. The aim is to come up with better alternatives to further improve the efficiency. Once the simulated results have been compiled, they shall be compared with those results obtained from the real existing data, and the improved efficiency will be derived from the observation that the simulated results are better. In this paper, the effect of a number of variable parameters are analyzed. These parameters are inlet and outlet pressures for both hot and cold fluids. Numerical simulation aims to find the best combination of the parameters, which give better performance compared with the existing one. Based on the results achieved from the data attained from the company, it was noted that the pressure drop reduces when there is an increase in cold input pressure from 480 kPa to 510 kPa while decreasing the hot input pressure from 520 kPa to 490 kPa based on the range of data. In conclusion, the pressure drop becomes better only at the hotter fluid region by 99.4 % while for the colder region it reduces by 50%. Therefore, physical design change is recommended to the SHE to establish better results.