CFD analysis of a pipe equipped with twisted tape

Abstract

In this work, a pipe provided with twisted tape inserts is analyzed. This system allows a significant increase of convective heat transfer coefficient by introducing a swirl motion which determines greater heat removal from the solid surface, by improving the fluid mixing. The analysis performed in this paper focuses on the evaluation of the thermal and flow quantities for a pipe of a shell and tube heat exchanger, previously optimized through a design software widely used in the petrochemical industry. The thermo and fluid dynamics analysis were performed by using a commercial CFD software (FluentTM ). After performing the necessary computational checks for the acceptance of the results provided by the solver, a pitch parameterization was performed through a finite volume simulation. In this way the behaviour of a highly viscous fluid was studied, whose thermo-physical characteristics are highly variable with temperature. Furthermore, using water as fluid, the behaviour of the pipe provided with inserts was investigated by varying the Reynolds number, through mass flow rate variation. To verify the correctness of the results, they were compared in both cases with correlations in the literature.