Research on the Heat Transfer and Flow Characteristics of a New Type of Aluminum Noncontact Thermal Resistance Finned Tubes

Abstract

With energy consumption increasing sharply and copper resource decreasing rapidly, the demand for a high-performance and efficient heat exchanger becomes more and more pressing. Therefore, it is very important to develop new technology, new materials, and low-cost and high-performance fin tubes, which is the main component of heat exchanger. In this paper, a new type of aluminum noncontact thermal resistance finned tube (ANCRF) is studied experimentally on the standard wind tunnel test bench. The performance curves of heat transfer and resistance and the experimental correlations were obtained in the experiment range of Reynolds number, which indicates that ANCRF has excellent heat transfer and flow resistance performance. Compared with a louvered fin tube and plate fin tube, the air-side convective heat transfer coefficient of ANCRF was approximately 63.06 and 176.33% higher on average; the friction factor was approximately −71.28 and 51.3% higher on average; and the heat transfer factor was approximately 135.3 and 105.9% higher on average. In addition, a simulation model was established. The positive correlation between the simulated results and the experimental data demonstrated the effectiveness of the model. With this model, the heat transfer process of ANCRF was simulated, with results indicating that the structure sizes of fin thickness, fin height, fin spacing, and fin angle all have great influence on the heat transfer and flow performance of ANCRF, and the rules of influence are different. This research has a guiding significance for the optimization design and application extending for this new type of fin tube.