Numerical study on the heat transfer and pressure drop characteristics of fin-and-tube surface with four round-convex strips around each tube

Abstract

In this paper, a three-dimensional numerical investigation is performed for both heat transfer and pressure drop of a new kind of slit fin applied to heat exchangers in air compression industry by FLUENT. A comparison between this new slit fin and normal plain fin is made. It is found that the flow and heat transfer come into full development stage after 12 rows. The effects of seven different parameters on the fully developed heat transfer performance are examined and all the calculation results agree well with the field synergy principle.Among these parameters,reducing spanwise fin pitch has the largest performance improvement. The optimum values are found for the height of slit and the length of rear slit. The correlations for j and f factors are proposed, which take four and five dimensionless geometric parameters into consideration, respectively.