Noise prevention in tube-type heat exchangers employed in gas turbines.

Abstract

Unusual noise is sometimes caused by tube-type heat exchangers employed to recover waste heat from a gas turbine. There are a few studies on Karman vortex-induced nosie from bare tubes or bare-tube banks placed in the air flow, but there is no study concerning Karman vortex-induced noise from finned tube banks. For the purpose of this investigation leading to reduce Karman vortex-induced nosie from heat exchangers, various finned tube models were made, and Karman vortex-induced noise was compared between this model and finned tubes used in a heat exchanger. As it was confirmed that there was an acceptable parallelism between the model and the finned tubes, the effect of interference plates on Karman vortex-induced noise was determined by varing the position and eccetricity of interference plates placed at the trailing end of the finned tube banks. As a result, unusual noise due to Karman vortex-induced nosie was successfully prevented.