Waste heat recovery is of great importance in industrial applications, in which heat transfer enhancement technologies play important roles. Aiming to employing heat transfer merits from longitudinal vortexes for potential waste heat recovery applications, inward sinusoidal rib tubes (SRTs) were employed as heat transfer enhancement devices, and computational fluid dynamics on tubular turbulent heat transfer and flow characteristics of the SRTs were conducted. Comparisons of thermal-hydraulic performances for a SRT with some typical enhanced heat transfer tubes and parametric studies of the SRTs involving flow structures and heat transfer mechanisms were performed. The main findings obtained from this research showed that at the similar conditions the SRT yielded higher Nusselt number (Nu), friction factor (f) and overall thermal performance evaluation criterion (PEC) than the other typical enhanced tubes. It was obtained that thermal convection in the SRTs was enhanced by the combined flow structures from transverse vortexes and longitudinal swirl flows. The results in the case studies proved that increasing rib height ratio, and decreasing pitch length ratio and rib width ratio facilitated enhancement of both Nu and f. In terms of the rib number, the SRT with the rib number of 3 gave the largest Nu, while the SRTs at the rib numbers of 2 and 3 had comparable f and they had larger flow resistance than others. In addition, the highest PEC of about 1.73 was achieved by the SRT with a pitch length ratio of 0.804, a rib height ratio of 0.065, a rib width ratio of 0.217 and a rib number of 3 at a Reynolds number of 5000.