Numerical investigation on the effect of cylindrical turbulator on performance of corrugated plate-fin heat exchanger

Abstract

The corrugated fin is one of the common fin types in plate-fin heat exchangers. The corrugated fins can promote fluid turbulence and separate or destroy the boundary layer. To further increase the turbulence of the fluid in the channel, the cylindrical turbulator is innovatively added to the corrugated finned channel, and its effects on heat transfer and flow resistance is investigated by numerical simulation. Moreover, the field synergy theory is used to analyze why the heat transfer effect of the channel is improved after adding the cylindrical turbulator. Considering the heat transfer effect and flow resistance synthetically, the comprehensive performance of the heat transfer channel can be improved by adding the cylindrical turbulator at low Reynolds numbers. Correspondingly, at high Reynolds numbers, adding the cylindrical turbulator will reduce the comprehensive performance. On this basis, the influence of corrugated channel geometric sizes on the heat transfer and flow properties is investigated. The correlations of Reynolds number, Prandtl number and geometric dimension on heat transfer and friction factor is established for different geometrical dimensions. The correctness of the correlation is verified by choosing four models with random geometric dimensions, and the average absolute error of heat transfer and friction factor is 6.45% and 5.53%.