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Numerical Simulation On A Novel Shell-And-Tube Hea PDF
Numerical Simulation On A Novel Shell-And-Tube Hea PDF
Xuankai Zhang, Dong Han, Weifeng He, Chen Yue and Wenhao Pu
Abstract
A novel shell-and-tube heat exchanger with screw cinquefoil orifice baffles is designed to grasp the weakness of the
traditional shell-and-tube heat exchanger with cinquefoil orifice baffles. It specifically enhances the heat transfer coeffi-
cient in the area between adjacent baffles and enhances the shell-side fluid flushing ability on bundles. In the proposed
shell-and-tube heat exchanger with screw cinquefoil orifice baffles, screw-type cinquefoil orifice baffles are installed in
the shell side. Shell-and-tube heat exchanger with screw cinquefoil orifice baffle is compared with shell-and-tube heat
exchanger with cinquefoil orifice baffles and the traditional shell-and-tube heat exchanger with segmental baffles by
means of numerical simulations. The numerical result shows that the heat transfer coefficient and shell-side fluid flushing
ability in the shell-and-tube heat exchanger with screw cinquefoil orifice baffle is higher than that in the shell-and-tube
heat exchanger with cinquefoil orifice baffles and shell-and-tube heat exchanger with segmental baffles, for the shell-side
fluid that is urged to flow in approximately continuous helical flow. Under the same shell-side mass flow rate, heat trans-
fer coefficient of shell-and-tube heat exchanger with screw cinquefoil orifice baffle is about 9.2% higher than that of
shell-and-tube heat exchanger with cinquefoil orifice baffles and shell-and-tube heat exchanger with segmental baffles by
about 5.4% on average. The article presents a novel design thought when researchers design heat exchangers.
Keywords
Computational fluid dynamics, heat exchanger, heat and mass transfer, numerical analysis, cinquefoil orifice baffle
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open-access-at-sage).
2 Advances in Mechanical Engineering
walls. This heat exchanger not only has a lower pres- orifice baffles. The heat transfer performance in the
sure drop, but also being less liable to fouls, eliminates area between adjacent baffles is still not satisfactory.
stagnant recirculation zones and avoids flow-induced Although there appear various types of orifice baffles
vibration compared to the conventional STHX-SG.6,8 in recent years, design of new shapes of the orifice
Because of these advantages, the STHX with orifice attracts research interests. The aforementioned prob-
baffles attracted considerable attention in recent years. lem has not been resolved, which limits the develop-
A El Maakoul et al.1 using computational fluid ment of STHX-COB.
dynamics (CFD) to simulated three STHXs with the While the shell-and-tube heat exchanger with helical
recently developed trefoil-hole, helical baffles, and the baffles (STHX-HB) shows good thermo-hydraulic per-
conventional segmental baffles, respectively, at low formance and low vibration level.9 STHX-HB was first
shell-side flow rates. And the results indicated that heli- proposed by Lutcha and Nemcansky.10 They proposed
cal baffles result in higher thermo-hydraulic perfor- the helical baffles in STHX-HB are the most important
mance while trefoil-hole baffles have a higher heat factor influencing heat transfer, which directly leads to
transfer performance with large pressure drop com- the shell-side fluid to flow in approximately continuous
pared to segmental baffles. Y You et al.6 based on the helical flow. And they found that the helical baffles
experimental results found that trefoil-hole baffles could force the shell-side fluid to approach plug flow,
could generate high-speed flush, intensive recirculation which increased the average temperature driving force.
flow, and high turbulence intensity level, which lead the The flow patterns induced by the baffles also intensified
Nusselt number of the shell side is about 4.5 times than the shell-side heat transfer remarkably.11 Generally
without baffles. Y You et al.8 studied the effect of baf- speaking, there are two kinds of helical baffles, contin-
fle number and baffle distance on the small-size heat uous helical baffles and discontinuous helical baffles.
exchanger with trefoil-hole baffles. The convection heat Considering the difficulty in the manufacture of contin-
transfer coefficient on the shell side of the small-size uous helical baffles, the discontinuous helical baffles
heat exchanger monotonically drops while the shell side formed by overlapped fans or oval-shaped plates to
overall thermo-hydraulic performance monotonically replace it now. But the leakage by discontinuous helical
rises. There are many types of orifice baffles, such as baffle is relatively large due to the triangle zones, which
trefoil-hole baffles, quatrefoil-hole baffles, and cinque- will reduce the heat transfer performance.12 S Wang
foil orifice baffles, but very few related academic litera- et al.11 proposed folded helical baffles which can block
ture are available.6 Figure 1 depicts the sketch of some the triangle leakage zones between two adjacent plain
familiar orifice baffles. And the shell-and-tube heat baffles in STHX-HB. And the experimental results
exchanger with cinquefoil orifice baffles (STHX-COB) showed that the integrative performance of STHX-HB
was the choice for further study. is greatly enhanced by the improved folded baffles.
However, the enhanced heat transfer region in To solve above problems, through using STHX-
STHX-COB is focused on the vicinity of cinquefoil COB as the foundation, introducing the concept of the
helical flow in STHX-HB, a new type of heat exchan-
ger, shell-and-tube heat exchanger with screw cinque-
foil orifice baffles (STHX-SCOB), was proposed.
STHX-SCOB provides a new choice for industry. In
this article, STHX-SCOB was simulated by CFD
method. The shell-side flow patterns of STHX-SG,
STHX-SCOB, and STHX-COB were compared
numerically. Moreover, impacts from two significant
parameters, including the helical angle and baffle thick-
ness, on the heat transfer and pressure drop perfor-
mance of STHX-SCOB, were studied.
Item Dimensions
where rus de
2 Re = ð12Þ
k ms
meff = m + mt , mt = rCm ,
e
h ð6Þ where ms is the dynamic viscosity is the shell side, and
h 1h de is the equivalent diameter. So, the expression used to
Cle = C1e
0
Model validation
Figure 4. STHX-SCOB results of different grid systems
Grid generation and independence. The three-dimensional (a = 38º, Db = 8 mm, m = 0.375 kg/s).
(3D) geometry was created in unigraphics next genera-
tion, which next meshed by tetrahedral and hexahedral
grids in the commercial code integrated computer engi- Figure 5 shows the simulation results by the method
neering and manufacturing code for computational fluid in this article compared with the results in Ozden and
dynamics (ICEM). Because ICEM has excellent merit on Tari.20 In addition, the results in Ozden and Tari20 are
managing very complex 3D geometries (see Figure 3). considered satisfactory by MG Yehia et al.21 The maxi-
According to Zhu et al.,18 the same method that the tet- mum relative deviation for heat transfer coefficient h is
rahedral mesh was used in the region near to the cinque- 5%, and the shell-side pressure drop Dp has the maxi-
foil orifice baffles and the hexahedral mesh is used in the mum relative deviation of 3%. Therefore, it can be con-
region outside of the cinquefoil orifice baffles is applied cluded that this model could gives a good prediction for
in the research, and the simulation results by this method heat transfer characteristics.
coincide well with the experimental results.
For make sure the accuracy of simulations, accord-
ing to Wang et al.12 and Yang et al.,19 the grid indepen- Results and discussion
dence of the numerical solutions was conducted on
STHX-SCOB, STHX-COB, and STHX-SG. Flow distributions in different heat exchangers
Four different grid systems are generated for the The flow behavior in STHX-SG is shown in Figure 6.
STHX-SCOB (a = 38°, Db = 8 mm, m = 0.375 kg/s) The streamline pattern in shell side is a zigzag pattern,
and their results are shown in Figure 4. Under the oper- which causes large dead zones. The region back of the
ation conditions of G3 and G4, differences of h=Dp and baffles has eddy formation and fluid recirculation, caus-
Dp were less than 2%. Considering both convergent ing a large amount of energy spent in this region.
time and solution precision, the grid quantities of The flow distributions in shell side of STHX-SCOB
STHX-SCOB, STHX-COB, and STHX-SG were chose and STHX-COB are totally different. Figure 7 shows
as 3,668,432, 3,086,673, and 3,269,825, respectively. the distribution of flow lines in shell-side velocity flow
field of these two heat exchangers when the shell-side
mass flow rate m is 0.375 kg/s. As shown in Figure 7,
Numerical investigations compared with other papers. The due to the sudden decrease in flow passage area at baf-
verified STHX-SG model geometry was made exactly fles, the shell fluid velocity increases, which results in
as Ozden and Tari20 and MG Yehia et al.21 for it is sim- jet effect and destruction to the boundary layer in two
ilar to the STHXs being studied in this article. The veri- heat exchangers. Besides, in Figure 7(c), the secondary
fied STHX-SG baffle number is 6, and the baffle cut flow can be found in local enlarging graph, which dis-
ratio is 36%, while other model geometrical parameters turbs the shell fluid and enhances the heat transfer.
are presented in Ozden and Tari20 and Yehia et al.21 While in Figure 7(b), due to the effect of the helical
According to the literature value, water is the working angle, the tube bundles are washed out by revolving
fluid. The shell inlet temperature is 300 K, and tube wall fluid. As shown in Figure 8(b), the shell flow velocity in
temperature is 450 K. The shell outlet is pressure outlet. STHX-SCOB is higher, especially in peripheral side
While the turbulence model is RNG k-e model, and tubes’ wall. The spiral motion brings about good mix-
pressure–velocity coupling is SIMPLE. The CFD pack- ing, which directly leads to improvement of heat trans-
age CFX is used to simulation. After grid independency fer. Moreover, a higher flow velocity enhances the
check, the number of cells is 2,841,973. shell-side fluid flushing ability. The new type of heat
6 Advances in Mechanical Engineering
Figure 5. The comparison between the result in Ozden and Tari20 and the simulation result by the proposed method: (a) variation
of h with tube side inlet flow rate m in comparison with Ozden and Tari and the results by the proposed method and (b) variation of
Dp with tube side inlet flow rate m in comparison with Ozden and Tari and the results by the proposed method.
Figure 6. (a) Flow distributions in STHX-SG (m = 0.375 kg/s) and (b) local magnification in STHX-SG.
exchanger is more like helical baffle heat exchanger in Pressure drop and comprehensive performance
some way. The relationship between the shell-side pressure drop
Dp and m is shown in Figure 10(a). The results of the
simulation indicate that a high Dp in STHX-SCOB is
Heat transfer coefficient obtained compared to that in STHX-COB and STHX-
Heat transfer coefficient h is a very significant para- SG. It is clear that the pressure drop of the STHX-
meter in design of industrial STHXs because it is related SCOB is about 15.4% on average higher than that of
to the area of land occupied by the equipment and the the STHX-SG and 36.0% on average higher than that
cost of production materials. Therefore, h is obtained of the STHX-COB. The reason for this phenomenon is
more attention in some cases. that helical flow path on screw-type cinquefoil orifice
Figure 9 illustrates relationship between h and m. baffles changes the direction of shell-side fluid flow and
In Figure 9, h of STHX-SCOB is obviously higher causes substantial dissipations of mechanical energy.
than that of STHX-COB by about 9.2% and STHX- But the pressure drop is not the only standard to
SG by about 5.4% on average. With m of 0.15 kg/s, h judge the performance of the heat exchanger.
in the STHX-SCOB is higher than that of the STHX- Comprehensive performance, CP = Nu f 1=3 , of the
COB by 15.4%; but when m increases to 1.5 kg/s, the three heat exchangers is shown in Figure 10(b). It can
difference drops down to 6.9%. The reason for this be seen from Figure 10(b) that CP in STHX-SCOB is
phenomenon is that in STHX-SCOB turbulence is 3.0% higher than that of STHX-COB with Re at 2322,
stronger than STHX-SG and STHX-COB, which and the difference drops down to 0.3% with Re at
leads to a higher heat transfer coefficient, particularly 11,610. However, when Re increases to 23,220, CP in
at low m. STHX-SCOB is 4.0% lower than that in STHX-COB.
Zhang et al. 7
Figure 7. Flow distributions in different heat exchangers (m = 0.375 kg/s): (a) flow distributions in STHX-COB, (b) flow
distributions in STHX-SCOB (a = 38º, Db = 8 mm), (c) local magnification in STHX-COB, and (d) local magnification in STHX-SCOB
(a = 38º, Db = 8 mm).
Figure 8. Velocity contours in different heat exchangers (m = 0.375 kg/s, Z = 200 mm): (a) velocity contours in STHX-COB and
(b) velocity contours in STHX-SCOB.
It can be inferred from above that the heat transfer per- Effects of structural parameters on STHX-SCOB
formance in STHX-SCOB is higher than that in
The helical angle of helical flow paths. According to the
STHX-COB at low Re number. Moreover, CP of
design thought about helical baffle heat exchanger,22,23
STHX-SG is higher than that of STHX-SCOB and
the helical angle a impacts heat transfer and flow char-
STHX-COB. It should be emphasized that this result is
acteristics of the STHX-SCOB significantly. STHX-
under the same mass flow rate, the fluid velocity of
SCOB with different helical angles (a = 27°, 38°, and
STHX-SG is much lower than those of STHX-SCOB
46°) was studied. As shown in Figure 11, h and Dp
and STHX-COB, leading to significant increase in CP
increase as a is increased. From Figure 11(d), h in
of STHX-SG at the same Reynolds number.
8 Advances in Mechanical Engineering
Conclusion
In this article, a novel STHX-SCOB with helical flow
paths is proposed to improve heat transfer performance
at shell side. When the traditional STHX-COB and
STHX-SG are compared, considering the impacts from
the structure parameters of screw-type cinquefoil orifice
baffle, heat transfer and pressure drop performance at
shell side is investigated, and the most significant con-
clusions are summarized as follows:
Figure 10. Other heat transfer performances: (a) pressure
drop versus the shell-side mass flow rate and (b) comprehensive 1. As a novel heat exchanger, STHX-SCOB pro-
performance versus the shell-side Reynolds number. vides a new heat transfer enhancement choice.
Besides, the screw structure in the STHX-SCOB
STHX-SCOB with a at 46° is 6.2% higher than that of improves fluid flushing ability on the shell side.
a at 38° on average. Similarly, h in STHX-SCOB with The screw-type cinquefoil orifice baffles enhance
a at 38° is 7.1% higher than that of a at 27°. But Dp in the heat transfer considerably, and this
Zhang et al. 9
Figure 11. Heat transfer performances with different helical angles: (a) velocity flow distribution (a = 27º, m = 0.375 kg/s,
Db = 8 mm), (b) velocity flow distribution (a = 38º, m = 0.375 kg/s, Db = 8 mm), (c) velocity flow distribution (a = 46º, m = 0.375 kg/s,
Db = 8 mm), (d) heat transfer coefficient versus the shell-side mass flow rate, (e) pressure drop versus the shell-side mass flow rate,
and (f) comprehensive performance versus the shell-side Reynolds number.
enhancement is done at the expense of a large angle of a at 38° and baffle thickness of Db at
pressure drop. So next, other screw-type orifice 8 mm in STHX-SCOB.
baffle heat exchangers should be researched to 3. Under the same shell-side mass flow rate m and
obtain the optimal structure parameters for Db at 8 mm, the bigger the a, the higher the h
other screw-type orifice baffle heat exchanger. and Dp. The heat transfer coefficient h of
2. Under the same shell-side mass flow rate m, STHX-SCOB with a at 46° is 6.2% higher than
heat transfer coefficient h of STHX-SCOB is that with a at 38°, while the pressure drop Dp
about 9.2% higher than that of STHX-COB of STHX-SCOB with a at 46° is about 36.9%
and STHX-SG by about 5.4% on average, higher than that with a at 38°. Similarly, the
while the pressure drop Dp of STHX-SCOB is heat transfer coefficient h of STHX-SCOB with
about 36.0% higher than that of STHX-COB a at 38° is about 7.1% higher than that with a
and STHX-SG by about 15.4% with the helical at 27°, while the pressure drop Dp of STHX-
10 Advances in Mechanical Engineering
Figure 12. Heat transfer performances with different baffle thicknesses: (a) temperature flow distribution (Db = 3 mm,
m = 0.375 kg/s, a= 46º), (b) temperature flow distribution (Db = 8 mm, m = 0.375 kg/s, a= 46º), (c) temperature flow distribution
(Db = 13 mm, m = 0.375 kg/s, a= 46º), (d) heat transfer coefficient versus the shell-side mass flow rate, (e) pressure drop versus the
shell-side mass flow rate, and (f) comprehensive performance versus the shell-side Reynolds number.
SCOB with a at 38° is about 31.6% higher than Declaration of conflicting interests
that with a at 27°. The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
4. Under the same shell-side mass flow rate m and respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
a at 46°, the bigger the Db , the higher h and Dp article.
are. The heat transfer coefficient h in the
STHX-SCOB with Db at 3 and 8 mm are 15.8%
Funding
and 8.3% lower than that with Db at 13 mm on
average, respectively. And the pressure drop Dp The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial sup-
in the STHX-SCOB with Db at 3 and 8 mm is port for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article: This work was supported by the Program of National
79.5% and 35.7% lower than that with Db at
Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51506090).
13 mm on average, respectively.
Zhang et al. 11
ts, in , temperature of inlet tube and outlet e turbulent kinetic energy dissipation rate
ts, out tube (K) (m2 =s3 )
tw tube wall temperature (K) m dynamic viscosity (kg/(m s))
u, v, w velocities in different directions (m/s) mt turbulent dynamic viscosity (kg/(m s))
ui inlet average velocity (m/s) l thermal conductivity (W/(m K))
us shell side average velocity (m/s) r fluid density (kg=m3 )
x, y, z Cartesian coordinate [ heat transfer quantity (W)
a helical angle of helical flow paths (°)
b cinquefoil orifice angle (°)