Investigation of the heat transfer coefficient during the condensation of small quantities of water vapour from a mixture with a high proportion of non-condensable gas in a horizontal smooth tube

Abstract

During heat recovery of exhaust gas energy in a shell and tube heat exchanger, the exhaust gas is cooled down and the water vapour content may condense when the corresponding temperature is reached. In this case, a condensation heat exchanger allows recovering the latent heat in addition to the sensible heat and is therefore beneficial for a preferably high heat recovery. The database and algorithms for the design of this kind of apparatus are still nowadays quite week because only little experimental work is realized with condensation of water vapour from a mixture with a very high proportion of non-condensable gas in horizontal tubes. The actual research work improves this database with a considerable amount of experimental data and proposes a correlation for the prediction of the heat transfer coefficient in an exhaust gas heat exchanger in which parts of the gas humidity condense. All experiments were carried out under conditions, which are typical for this kind of heat exchangers, hence the presented results can be used for the design of condensation heat exchangers in industrial heat transfer systems. A gas inlet temperature of 120 °C, a range of the air-steam mixture Reynolds number 11,000 ≦ Re ≦ 31,000, three tube lengths between 1.87 m and 3.04 m, water vapour volume fractions of 7 % to 14.5 % as well as tube diameters of 22 mm and 28 mm were selected to derive the correlation. Furthermore, additional tube lengths (0.574 m, 0.973 m, 1.373 m) were investigated to determine the parameters influencing the condensation rate and comprehensive location profiles over the tube length. A correlation for a correction factor fC is derived, which enables to calculate the increase of the heat transfer coefficient due to condensation from the dry heat transfer coefficient without condensation. This dry heat transfer coefficient is calculated by the measured values in the inlet and outlet for a purely dry air-steam mixture cooling without condensation. The correction factor fC depend on the water vapour volume fraction, the Reynolds number and the geometry ratio between the inner diameter and the tube length.