Vibration and Heat Transfer Study on Elastic-Tube Heat Exchange with Curved Baffle

Abstract

A heat exchanger with a curved baffle for an elastic-tube bundle (ETB) is designed to effectively improve the performance based on a common ETB heat exchanger, and this paper systematically studies its vibration and heat transfer characteristics under different inlet velocity and structural parameters. The results indicate that the ETB vibration characteristics increase significantly with an increasing velocity, and the average amplitude of the ETB at 0.7 m/s is 4.51 times higher than that at 0.1 m/s. Similarly, the heat transfer performance subsequently decreases, but the average heat transfer coefficient of the ETB is significantly increased with the increase of the inlet velocity. When the long axis increases from 45 to 75 mm, the vibration intensity of the ETB decreases sharply, and the x direction and the total vibration Aa decrease by 43.4 and 51.5%, respectively. At the same time, the heat transfer coefficient of the ETB and its growth rate decrease by 3.9 and 45.6%. Additionally, the baffle curvature has little impact on the vibration and heat transfer performance. The difference between the average heat transfer coefficient and the total vibration amplitude of the ETB for different baffle curvatures is less than 5%.