Numerical Investigation of Finned-tube Heat Exchanger with Circular, Elliptical & Rectangular Tubes

Abstract

A three dimensional numerical study has been conducted on finned-tube heat exchanger with multiple rows of tubes using ANSYS (Fluent). The objective of this study is to numerically investigate finned tube heat exchanger with different type of tubes such as circular, elliptical and rectangular tubes. As circular tubes has much pressure drop so elliptical and rectangular tubes has been introduced in order to reduce pressure drop. As well as heat transfer has also been examined. The finite volume based CFD code ANSYS Fluent 16.2 is used to calculate the flow and temperature fields and by applying SIMPLEC algorithm. At low velocity of air and water, nothing significant occurred for the combination of tubes. At high velocity in maximum tube combination there was heat transfer (HT) enhancement and pressure drop reduction when compared with circular tubes only in case of air. When the combinations of circular, elliptical and rectangular tubes has been compared with circular tube heat exchanger (CTHX) heat transfer reduces as well as pressure drop (PD) also reduces for air. In case of water vapor HT and PD behaves the same. When those combinations has been compared with elliptical tube HX, for air in some cases heat transfer remains same and on other case it increases. For pressure drop in case of air, in some cases it reduces and on other cases it reduces. For elliptical tube HX for the fluid water vapor HT and PD both remains same or reduces. This work has not been with conducted any numerical simulation on rectangular Heat exchanger reason behind it there isn’t any existence of this kind of heat exchanger. However, it could be numerically conducted to examine the results between those combination and rectangular heat exchanger.