Parametric Analysis of a High-efficient Heat Exchanger

Abstract

Due to the increasingly serious impact of environmental pollution in recent years, people’s awareness of environmental protection has also increased. Owing to the shortage of petrochemical fuels and the increase in prices, people are looking for alternative energy sources, while also trying to use renewable energy to reduce energy consumption rate and greenhouse gas emissions. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA) research on renewable energy and energy conservation technologies, it is expected to reduce 1.5 billion tons of CO2 Emissions by 2050 if people utilize energy regeneration technology and continue to improve its regeneration efficiency. Nowadays, many industries often use heat exchangers to recover heat energy, such as the petrochemical industry, steel industry, metal processing industry, and so on. When it comes to designing the heat exchanger, we need to consider its material and size and evaluate its heat transfer efficiency, pressure loss, and production cost. In this study, three types of heat exchangers with different geometrical shapes and fins are designed, which are flat fins, tail fins, and eye-shaped fins. The ANSYS/ FLUENT software is used to build models and simulate, mainly for the above three types. The heat transfer efficiency and pressure loss of heat exchangers with different geometrical fins are discussed. After simulation and comparison, the heat transfer efficiency of the flat fin is the best among the three types of fins, but the pressure loss is the largest, while the heat transfer efficiency of the eye-shaped fin is slightly lower than that of the flat fin, and the pressure loss is the smallest among the three fins. This study divides the enthalpy value of the air on the cold side by the pressure loss of the exhaust gas on the hot side and uses it as an index for comparing heat exchangers’ performance. The design of the heat exchangers is better if the index is higher. Among the three types of fins, the eye-shaped fins’ index value is the highest, followed by the tail-type fin, and the flat-type fin has the lowest value.