A CFD investigation of the design variables affecting the performance of finned-tube heat exchangers

Abstract

A wide variety of heating and cooling applications use heat exchangers. The increase in energy prices, the requirement for size reduction, and restriction on greenhouse gas emissions has led to the need for finding ways to develop efficient heat exchangers. A cost-efficient way to enhance the model of a heat exchanger by visualizing the effects of the design parameters is using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The reason for this exploration was to lead an examination of the varieties/changes in the general intensity move process for a Finned-Tube Heat Exchanger (FTHE), also known as Air Coil Heat Exchanger (ACHE) with a variety of plan boundaries like the quantity of tubes, course of action of tubes, and the material utilized for the intensity exchanger. The widely used heat exchanger that uses refrigerant R314a and air as the working fluids was simulated with different design modifications. The simulated results exhibited as to how the number of tubes, arrangement of coils/tubes, material of tubes, and density / spacing of fins, effects the pressure drop, temperature and velocities profiles, and heat exchangers’ transfer of a heat. The use of copper coils improved the heat transfer by approximately 61% as compared to aluminium coils.