Enhancement of Heat Transfer in Perforated Circular Finned-Tube Heat Exchangers: A Numerical Investigation

Abstract

The effects of employing perforations of circular shape in circular finned-tube heat exchangers (CFTHEs) are numerically investigated in the present study using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software. Simulations performed on the validated CFD model shows considerable increase in the Average Nusselt Number for perforated circular finned-tube heat exchangers (PCFTHEs) as compared to their solid counterpart, with only a slight increase in Euler Number for 10,000 ≤ Re ≤ 50,000. Diameter of perforations (dp ) is kept equal to 6mm and optimum range of number of perforations per fin (np ) by analysis is found to be 16 to 20. For this range, the performance of PCFTHEs improves with the increase in number of perforations per fin. The maximum increase in Average Nusselt Number is 24% for dp = 6mm and np = 20 at Re = 10,000. The minimum increase in Average Nusselt Number is 3% for dp = 6mm and np = 14 at Re = 40,000. This increase in Average Nusselt Number on introducing perforations is due to (i) flow of localized air jets through the perforations, and (ii) reduction in recirculation region caused by the separation of flow. This improvement in the performance of CFTHEs on introducing perforations is achieved with the maximum and minimum reduction in weight of 41% and 29% respectively.