Experimental Study on Heat Transfer and Pressure Drop of Recuperative Heat Exchangers Using Carbon Foam

2010 ◽  
Vol 132 (9) ◽  
Author(s):  
Y. R. Lin ◽  
J. H. Du ◽  
W. Wu ◽  
L. C. Chow ◽  
W. Notardonato

This work focuses on the development of high-effectiveness recuperative heat exchangers using solid and corrugated carbon foam blocks. Characterization tests were conducted on heat transfer and pressure drop for a single carbon foam block with different sizes. Results show that carbon foam can be an effective medium for heat transfer enhancement, and a short length in the flow direction yields a high heat transfer coefficient. The corrugation can enhance heat transfer and reduce pressure drop at the same time. A recuperative heat exchanger with carbon foam, which consists of separate blocks of carbon foams packed between thin sheets of stainless steel, was designed. The hot and cold flow paths were arranged in counterflow in the recuperator. The heat exchanger was designed in a modular manner so that it can be scaled up for a larger heat transfer requirement or a higher overall effectiveness. The anisotropic property of carbon foam was exploited to achieve higher effectiveness for one pair of foam blocks. Experiments with four pairs of carbon foams were conducted to evaluate the performance of carbon foam used in the recuperative heat exchanger. Measurements were made for both solid and corrugated foams for comparison. With four pairs of carbon foam blocks, an overall effectiveness εtotal greater than 80% was achieved. This paper demonstrates an approach to reach an effectiveness εtotal of 98% by placing many pairs of carbon foams in series.

2013 ◽  
Vol 832 ◽  
pp. 160-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Alam Khairul ◽  
Rahman Saidur ◽  
Altab Hossain ◽  
Mohammad Abdul Alim ◽  
Islam Mohammed Mahbubul

Helically coiled heat exchangers are globally used in various industrial applications for their high heat transfer performance and compact size. Nanofluids can provide excellent thermal performance of this type of heat exchangers. In the present study, the effect of different nanofluids on the heat transfer performance in a helically coiled heat exchanger is examined. Four different types of nanofluids CuO/water, Al2O3/water, SiO2/water, and ZnO/water with volume fractions 1 vol.% to 4 vol.% was used throughout this analysis and volume flow rate was remained constant at 3 LPM. Results show that the heat transfer coefficient is high for higher particle volume concentration of CuO/water, Al2O3/water and ZnO/water nanofluids, while the values of the friction factor and pressure drop significantly increase with the increase of nanoparticle volume concentration. On the contrary, low heat transfer coefficient was found in higher concentration of SiO2/water nanofluids. The highest enhancement of heat transfer coefficient and lowest friction factor occurred for CuO/water nanofluids among the four nanofluids. However, highest friction factor and lowest heat transfer coefficient were found for SiO2/water nanofluids. The results reveal that, CuO/water nanofluids indicate significant heat transfer performance for helically coiled heat exchanger systems though this nanofluids exhibits higher pressure drop.


2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 137-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rafał Andrzejczyk ◽  
Tomasz Muszyński

Abstract The shell and coil heat exchangers are commonly used in heating, ventilation, nuclear industry, process plant, heat recovery and air conditioning systems. This type of recuperators benefits from simple construction, the low value of pressure drops and high heat transfer. In helical coil, centrifugal force is acting on the moving fluid due to the curvature of the tube results in the development. It has been long recognized that the heat transfer in the helical tube is much better than in the straight ones because of the occurrence of secondary flow in planes normal to the main flow inside the helical structure. Helical tubes show good performance in heat transfer enhancement, while the uniform curvature of spiral structure is inconvenient in pipe installation in heat exchangers. Authors have presented their own construction of shell and tube heat exchanger with intensified heat transfer. The purpose of this article is to assess the influence of the surface modification over the performance coefficient and effectiveness. The experiments have been performed for the steady-state heat transfer. Experimental data points were gathered for both laminar and turbulent flow, both for co current- and countercurrent flow arrangement. To find optimal heat transfer intensification on the shell-side authors applied the number of transfer units analysis.


2013 ◽  
Vol 655-657 ◽  
pp. 461-464 ◽  
Author(s):  
Su Fang Song

The three-dimensional model of heat exchangers with continuous helical baffles was built. The fluid flow dynamics and heat transfer of shell side in the helical baffled heat exchanger were simulated and calculated. The velocity, pressure and temperature distributions were achieved. The simulation shows that with the same baffle pitch, shell-side heat transfer coefficient increased by 25% and the pressure drop decreases by 18% in helical baffled heat exchanger compared with segmental helical baffles. With the analyzing of the flow and heat transfer in heat exchanger in 5 different inclination angles from 11°to 21°, it can be found that both shell side heat transfer coefficient and pressure drop will reduce respectively by 86% and 52% with the increases 11°to 21°of the inclination angles. Numerical simulation provided reliable theoretical reference for further engineering research of heat exchanger with helical baffles.


2001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arash Saidi ◽  
Daniel Eriksson ◽  
Bengt Sundén

Abstract This paper presents a discussion and comparison of some heat exchanger types readily applicable to use as intercoolers in gas turbine systems. The present study concerns a heat duty of the intercooler for a gas turbine of around 17 MW power output. Four different types of air-water heat exchangers are considered. This selection is motivated because of the practical aspects of the problem. Each configuration is discussed and explained, regarding advantages and disadvantages. The available literature on the pressure drop and heat transfer correlations is used to determine the thermal-hydraulic performance of the various heat exchangers. Then a comparison of the intercooler core volume, weight, pressure drop is presented.


Entropy ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (12) ◽  
pp. 1143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Fontaine ◽  
Takeshi Yasunaga ◽  
Yasuyuki Ikegami

Ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) uses the natural thermal gradient in the sea. It has been investigated to make it competitive with conventional power plants, as it has huge potential and can produce energy steadily throughout the year. This has been done mostly by focusing on improving cycle performances or central elements of OTEC, such as heat exchangers. It is difficult to choose a suitable heat exchanger for OTEC with the separate evaluations of the heat transfer coefficient and pressure drop that are usually found in the literature. Accordingly, this paper presents a method to evaluate heat exchangers for OTEC. On the basis of finite-time thermodynamics, the maximum net power output for different heat exchangers using both heat transfer performance and pressure drop was assessed and compared. This method was successfully applied to three heat exchangers. The most suitable heat exchanger was found to lead to a maximum net power output 158% higher than the output of the least suitable heat exchanger. For a difference of 3.7% in the net power output, a difference of 22% in the Reynolds numbers was found. Therefore, those numbers also play a significant role in the choice of heat exchangers as they affect the pumping power required for seawater flowing. A sensitivity analysis showed that seawater temperature does not affect the choice of heat exchangers, even though the net power output was found to decrease by up to 10% with every temperature difference drop of 1 °C.


Author(s):  
Soheil Soleimanikutanaei ◽  
Cheng-Xian Lin ◽  
Dexin Wang

Heat and water recovery using Transport Membrane Condenser (TMC) based heat exchangers is a promising technology in power generation industry. In this type of innovative heat exchangers the tube walls are made of a nano-porous material and have a high membrane selectivity which is able to extract condensate water from the flue gas in the presence of the other non-condensable gases such as CO2, O2 and N2. Considering the fact that for industrial applications, a matrix of TMC heat exchangers with several TMC modulus in the cross section or along the flow direction is necessary. Numerical simulation of multi-stage TMC heat exchanger units is of a great importance in terms of design, performance evaluation and optimization. In this work, performance of a two-stage TMC heat exchanger unit has been studied numerically using a multi-species transport model. In order to investigate the performance of the two-stage TMC heat exchanger unit, parametric study on the effect of transversal and longitudinal pitches in terms of heat transfer, pressure drop and condensation rate inside the heat exchangers have been carried out. The results indicate that the heat transfer and condensation rates both increase by reducing TMC tube pitches in the second stage and increasing the number of TMC tube pitches in the first stage of the units.


Author(s):  
Rong Yu ◽  
Andrew D. Sommers ◽  
Nicole C. Okamoto ◽  
Koushik Upadhyayula

In this study, we have explored the effectiveness of heat exchangers constructed using anisotropic, micro-patterned aluminum fins to more completely drain the condensate that forms on the heat transfer surface during normal operation with the aim of improving the thermal-hydraulic performance of the heat exchanger. This study presents and critically evaluates the efficacy of full-scale heat exchangers constructed from these micro-grooved surfaces by measuring dry/wet air-side pressure drop and dry/wet air-side heat transfer data. The new fin surface design was shown to decrease the core pressure drop of the heat exchanger during wet operation from 9.3% to 52.7%. Furthermore, these prototype fin surfaces were shown to have a negligible effect on the heat transfer coefficient under both dry and wet conditions while at the same time reducing the wet airside pressure drop thereby decreasing fan power consumption. That is to say, this novel fin surface design has shown the ability, through improved condensate management, to enhance the thermal-hydraulic performance of plain-fin-and-tube heat exchangers used in air-conditioning applications. This paper also presents data pertaining to the durability of the alkyl silane coating.


2012 ◽  
Vol 560-561 ◽  
pp. 156-160
Author(s):  
Lin Ping Lu ◽  
Liang Ying

The experiments on heat transfer coefficient, pressure drop and thermal stress were done to heat exchangers with corrugated tubes and staight tubes. By analyising and comparing the heat transfer coeffient, pressure drop in tube side and shell side and axial force and stress, some conclusions can be conducted that the corrugated tube heat exchanger has better heat transfer coeffient, higher pressure drop and much lower stress caused by temperatur difference, also, it has obvious advantages under the circumstance of low Reynolds number and high temperature difference.


Author(s):  
Foluso Ladeinde ◽  
Kehinde Alabi ◽  
Wenhai Li

Manifold-microchannel combinations used on heat transfer surfaces have shown the potential for superior heat transfer performance to pressure drop ratio when compared to chevron type corrugations for plate heat exchangers (PHE) [1–4]. However, compared with heat transfer enhancements such as intermating troughs and Chevron corrugations, manifold-microchannels (MM) have several times more variables that influence the heat transfer and pressure drop characteristics, including microchannel width, depth, passes, manifold depth, width, and manifold fin thickness. Previous work has reported on the effects of some of the variables, and provides some models for their effects on thermal and hydraulic performance. The current paper presents a genetic algorithm (GA)-based procedure to analyze the implicit effects of some of the manifold-microchannel variables, and compare the performance of manifold-microchannel plate heat exchangers to those using standard Chevron corrugations. The objective of the present work is to evaluate the performance of manifold-microchannel heat transfer enhancements and demonstrate the potential for using GA-based procedure to optimize the heat exchanger. This paper also presents the modifications of the standard GA algorithm when applied to the optimization of MM. The resulting GA procedure is particularly well suited to PHEs for several reasons, including the fact that it does not require continuous variables or functional dependence on the design variables. In addition, the computational effort required for the GA technique in our implementation scales linearly, with a scaling coefficient that is significantly less than one, making it economical to analyze PHEs with several variables with degrees of freedom (DOF) with respect to the fitness function. The results of optimizing a manifold-microchannel plate heat exchanger are presented, and the exchanger’s performance is compared to more conventional PHE of the same volume utilizing chevron corrugations. Finally, results from the empirical procedure presented in this paper for a manifold-microchannel are compared with experimental measurements in Andhare [5].


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