Thermal and Fluid Flow Analysis of Shell-and-Tube Heat Exchangers with Smooth and Dimpled Tubes

Abstract

This current work mainly focuses on the enhancement of the heat transfer and fluid flow characteristics of shell-and-tube heat exchangers by incorporating dimples on the smooth or conventional tubes. With the aid of the ANSYS (Fluent) commercial software package, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations under a steady-state condition were conducted on heat exchanger having a single shell and 12 tubes (with or without dimples), 50% baffle cut, 100mm baffle spacing and turbulent flow. The temperature, velocity, and pressure fields at the shell and tube zone in both cases are analyzed. The computational fluid dynamics results of the heat exchanger with dimpled tubes are compared with conventional (smooth) tubes. However, the results show that a shell and tube heat exchanger with dimpled tubes has a higher overall heat transfer coefficient than that of conventional (smooth) tubes. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium provided the original work is properly cited.

Numerical Thermal Augmentation of Ternary Nanofluid in a Tube with Stent, Torus-Ring and Surface-Grooved Twisted Tapes Under Non-Uniform Wall Temperature

“…Water was used as the working fluid for the mass flow rates 0.2 to 0.5 kg/s. The study reported that a triangular tube arrangement possessed the best thermal performance with a heat transfer coefficient of 2.31 kW/m 2 K. Fetuga et al [42] performed a computational study to explore the influence of dimples on the tube side of the STHE over a mass flow rate 0.2-0.5 kg/s with water as the working fluid. They concluded that there was an improvement of 14.2% in the dimpled STHE compared with the STHE with a smooth tube.…”