Performance evaluation of helical coil heat exchanger with annulus shell side using computational fluid dynamics

Abstract

Helical coil heat exchanger had showed high thermal performance in many applications. Improvement and evaluation of helical coil heat exchanger had attracted many researchers. The main interest of the research usually only on the tube side with the fact that it has higher thermal resistance than the shell side. But, with high thermal performance of helical coil tube, the shell-side becomes important to investigate especially the geometry effect, to furthermore increase the total performance of the heat exchanger. In this study, three-dimensional helical coil heat performance simulation at steady state condition is performed using Computational Fluid Dynamics. Two type of shell side performance is compared, one with cylindrical and the other with annulus shell. Thermal hydraulic performance of cylindrical and annulus shell is evaluated at the same heat transfer rate and Reynolds number conditions. It is shown that the heat transfer performance of the annulus shell is better than the cylindrical one by average of 1200% in term of Nusselt number. The increase of heat transfer performance is accompanied with the increase of pressure drop by average of 379%. In overall, it is recommended to consider annulus shell compared to cylindrical one for the helical coil to increase heat transfer performance.