Numerical simulation and analysis of enhanced heat transfer in corrugated tube heat exchanger

Abstract

At present, in many fields such as petrochemical industry, in order to make better use of heat energy and reduce energy consumption in the process of equipment operation, heat transfer enhancement of heat exchange equipment has attracted more and more attention. Corrugated tube has many advantages compared with other smooth tubes, which are enhancing heat transfer, strong anti-fouling ability and easy to clean. In this paper, a heat exchanger with corrugated tube is studied. The geometry is meshed with the software GAMBIT. It is used with Fluent software and the initial and boundary conditions are set. Heat transfer performance between smooth tube and corrugated tube at the same inner wall temperature and velocity. Then, the influence from inlet velocity on heat transfer performance is investigated. The variation of temperature field, pressure field and velocity field in corrugated tube heat exchanger with different inlet velocity is discussed. The results show that the enhanced heat transfer effect of corrugated tube is much better than that of smooth tubes. At three different inlet velocities (0.5m/s, 1m/s, 3m/s), the enhanced heat transfer effects of the corrugated tube heat exchanger are different. With the increase of inlet velocity, the heat transfer effects of corrugated tube heat exchanger are enhanced, but the extent of enhancement decreases. In the range of this paper, the optimal inlet velocity is 0.5m/s in order to obtain the more heat transfer quantity and lower operation cost.