Achieving a heat exchanger design for optimal performance has been a challenge for designers and engineers. Heat exchnagers are being used in industry for decades. However, heat exchanger design is still a challege with respect to performance optimization and size reduction. So heat exchangers are usually optimized using iterative simulation techniques. This study presents a simplified simulation procedure for thermal-hydraulic performance evaluation of a small heat exchanger design. Both the heat transfer coefficient and pressure drop are simulated for a nine tubes-based shell and tube heat exchanger. A detailed mesh sensitivity analysis is performed to arrive at numerically converged solution. The results of the study are compared to Bell Delaware (BD) and Flow Stream (FS) analytical methods. Results obtained using all three methods show similar trends. Heat transfer coefficient determined using Bell Delaware method is found to be in good agreement with that obtained from ANSYS CFX, whereas pressure drop calculated using Flow stream method is within small percentage difference with CFX results. The simulation results are verified by the results obtained using analytical methods. The overall objective of the study is to evaluate the potential of analytical procedures which can significantly simplify the calculation and are less computational-time intensive


Comparative Analysis of the Thermal-Hydraulic Performance Evaluation Procedures for Shell & Tube Type Heat Exchangers

Division / Sponsors: 
Heat Transfer Division (HTD), Fluids Engineering Division (FED)

Heat Transfer Summer Conference
Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/HT/HT2020/volume/83709

18th International Conference on Nanochannels, Microchannels, and Minichannels
Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/ICNMM/ICNMM2020/volume/83693

Fluids Engineering Division Summer Meeting
Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/FEDSM/FEDSM2020/volume/83716

HT-ICNMM2020 - Virtual Conference, SHTC - Virtual Conference, FEDSM2020 - Virtual Conference

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