Shellside Waterflow Pressure Drop Distribution Measurements in an Industrial-Sized Test Heat Exchanger

1988 ◽  
Vol 110 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Halle ◽  
J. M. Chenoweth ◽  
M. W. Wambsganss

Throughout the life of a heat exchanger, a significant part of the operating cost arises from pumping the heat transfer fluids through and past the tubes. The pumping power requirement is continuous and depends directly upon the magnitude of the pressure losses. Thus, in order to select an optimum heat exchanger design, it is is as important to be able to predict pressure drop accurately as it is to predict heat transfer. This paper presents experimental measurements of the shellside pressure drop for 24 different segmentally baffled bundle configurations in a 0.6-m (24-in.) diameter by 3.7-m (12-ft) long shell with single inlet and outlet nozzles. Both plain and finned tubes, nominally 19-mm (0.75-in.) outside diameter, were arranged on equilateral triangular, square, rotated triangular, and rotated square tube layouts with a tube pitch-to-diameter ratio of 1.25. Isothermal water tests for a range of Reynolds numbers from 7000 to 100,000 were run to measure overall as well as incremental pressure drops across sections of the exchanger. The experimental results are given and correlated with a pressure drop versus flowrate relationship.

2021 ◽  
pp. 10295-10338
Author(s):  
Yahya Yaser Shanyour AL-Salman, Ali Sabri Abbas

The thermal and flow performance of the circular annular finned tube heat exchanger with perforated fins were investigated numerically using ANSYS Fluent 2020 software, RNG k-e model with enhanced wall treatment, global performance criterion was introduced as evaluation factor of the heat exchanger performance, the parameters to be investigated were the number of holes, size of hole, tilt angle of the finned tube, fin height and spacing between fins. Agreement was found with literature that the tilt angle causes increase in heat transfer rate and increase in the pressure drop as well, but the change the global performance criterion as function to tilt angle depends on the fin heights, for higher fin heights the effective change of the pressure drop become greater than the increase in the heat transfer rate and the contrast occur in the cases of smaller fin heights, we have found that the perforation in tilted annular circular finned tubes causes an increase in the heat transfer rate and an enhancement in the total heat exchanger performance, increasing the number of holes will enhance the performance of the heat exchanger and the spacing increase reduces the heat exchanger performance.


Author(s):  
Justin J. Gossard ◽  
Andrew D. Sommers

The need for more compact and more efficient heat exchangers in the aerospace, automotive, and HVAC&R industries has led to the development of heat exchangers that utilize minichannel or microchannel tubes coupled with louvered fins. Minichannel and microchannel heat exchangers exhibit enhanced heat transfer with a minimal increase in pressure drop over conventional round tube, plain fin heat exchangers often with a significant reduction in the required refrigeration charge and overall heat exchanger size. This paper presents the development and validation of a finite volume, steady-state evaporator model to be used as an aid in heat exchanger design and analysis. The model focuses on evaporator geometries that include minichannel and microchannel tubes with louvered fins and headers. Multiple published correlations provide the user with options for calculating the air-side and refrigerant-side heat transfer and pressure drops within the control volume. Once the model was validated, it was then briefly used to study the effects of maldistribution of refrigerant within the inlet headers on the cooling capacity and refrigerant side pressure drop.


Author(s):  
K. Kawaguchi ◽  
K. Okui ◽  
Y. Hasegawa

In recent years the requirement for reduction of energy consumption has been increasing to solve the problems of the global warming and the shortage of petroleum resources. For example in the power generation field, as the thermal power generation occupied 60% of the power generation demand, the improvement of the thermal efficiency is required considerably. This paper described the heat transfer and pressure drop characteristics of the finned tube banks used for the heat exchanger in the thermal power generation. The characteristics were clarified by testing the serrated finned tubes banks for improvement of higher heat transfer and the conventional spiral finned tube banks under the same test conditions. The equations to predict heat transfer coefficient and pressure drop which are necessary on design of the heat exchanger were proposed.


Author(s):  
George Hall ◽  
James Marthinuss

This paper will discuss air-cooled compact heat exchanger design using published data. Kays & London’s “Compact Heat Exchangers” [1] contains measured heat transfer and pressure drop data on a variety of circular and rectangular passages including circular tubes, tube banks, straight fins, louvered fins, strip or lanced offset fins, wavy fins and pin fins. While “Compact Heat Exchangers” is the benchmark for air cooled heat exchanger test data it makes no attempt to summarize the results or steer the thermal designer to an optimized design based on the different factors or combination of heat transfer, pressure drop, size, weight, or even cost. Using this reduced data and the analytical solutions provided highly efficient compact heat exchangers could be designed. This paper will guide a thermal engineer toward this optimized design without having to run trade studies on every possible heat exchanger design configuration. Typical applications of published fin data in the aerospace and military electronics include electronics cold plates, card rack walls and air-to-air heat exchangers using fan driven and ECS driven air. Airborne electronics often require extremely dense packaging techniques to fit all the required functions into the available volume. While leaving little room for cooling hardware this also drives power densities up to levels (20 W/sq-cm) that require highly efficient heat transfer techniques. Several design issues are discussed including pressure drop, heat transfer, compactness, axial conduction, flow distribution and passage irregularities (bosses). Comparisons between fin performance are made and conclusions are drawn about the applicability of each type of fin to avionics thermal management.


1985 ◽  
Vol 107 (2) ◽  
pp. 345-353 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. M. Sparrow ◽  
J. A. Perez

Per-tube heat transfer coefficients and per-compartment and intracompartment pressure drops were measured on the shell side of a shell and tube heat exchanger. The main focus of the work was to determine the response of these quantities to variations in the size of the baffle window; the Reynolds number was also varied parametrically. The pressure measurements showed that the fluid flow is fully developed downstream of the first compartment of the heat exchanger and that the per-compartment pressure drop is constant in the fully developed regime. Within a compartment, the pressure drop in the upstream half is much larger than that in the downstream half. The per-tube heat transfer coefficients vary substantially within a given compartment (on the order of a factor of two), giving rise to a nonuniform thermal loading of the tubes. Row-average and compartment-average heat transfer coefficients were also evaluated. The lowest row-average coefficients were those for the first and last rows in a compartment, while the highest coefficient is that for the row just upstream of the baffle edge. It was demonstrated that the per-tube heat transfer coefficients are streamwise periodic for a module consisting of two consecutive compartments.


Author(s):  
M. A. Arie ◽  
A. H. Shooshtari ◽  
S. V. Dessiatoun ◽  
M. M. Ohadi

Over the last decade, rapid development of additive manufacturing techniques has allowed the fabrication of innovative designs which could not have been manufactured using conventional fabrication technologies. One field that can benefit from such technology is heat exchanger fabrication, as heat exchanger design has become more and more complex due to the demand for higher performance systems. One specific heat exchanger design that has shown significant performance enhancement potential over conventional designs and can greatly benefit from additive manufacturing technology is a manifold-microchannel heat exchanger. It is a design that combines careful fluid distribution through appropriate manifolds with an enhanced heat transfer surface design to achieve specific thermohydraulics performance expectations. Additive manufacturing allows fins as thin as 150 μm to be fabricated, which is an important enabler feature for the heat exchanger thermal performance. In addition, additive manufacturing allows the manifold and the microchannel sections to be fabricated as a single piece, which eliminates the need to fuse those sections together through a subsequent bonding process. As part of this work, we fabricated and experimentally tested a high-performance titanium alloy (Ti64) air-water heat exchanger that utilizes manifold-microchannel design. The heat exchanger was fabricated using direct metal laser sintering (DMLS) fabrication technique. The air-side implemented a manifold-microchannel design, while the water side used multiple rectangular channels in parallel. This was because the major thermal resistance occurs on the air side. The pressure drop and heat transfer performance of this heat exchanger were evaluated. The experimental results showed a noticeable performance reduction compared to the ones projected by numerical simulation due to an inaccuracy and low fidelity in printing of thin fin profile. However, despite this manufacturing inaccuracy, compared to a conventional wavy-fin surface, 15%–50% increase in heat transfer coefficient was possible for the same pressure drop value. Compared to a plain plate-fin surface, 95%–110% increase in heat transfer coefficient was possible for the same pressure drop value. The air-side heat transfer coefficient in the range of 100–450 W/m2K was achievable using manifold-microchannel technology for air-side pressure drop of 90–1800Pa. Since metal based additive manufacturing is still in the developmental stage, it is anticipated that with further refinement of the manufacturing process in future designs, the fabrication accuracy can be improved.


Author(s):  
L E Haseler ◽  
R G Owen ◽  
R G Sardesai

The various processes occurring in shell and tube heat exchangers are examined for their dependence on the physical properties of the fluid streams. This dependence, coupled with estimates of likely uncertainties in the various properties, is used in developing a simple procedure for evaluating the resultant uncertainty in heat exchanger design calculations. Two case studies, which use a well-tested computer program, have shown that the above procedure adequately quantifies the uncertainties in the calculation of heat transfer area and pressure drop.


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