Finned Tube Heat Exchanger CFD Simulation

Finned Tube Heat Exchanger Project Description

In this project, the heat transfer inside a Finned Tube heat exchanger is investigated. Finned Tube heat exchangers are finned tubes whose main purpose is to create a wider surface about 20 to 30 times larger than the surface of a normal tube heat exchanger. As a result, the volume of the heat exchanger as well as the economic efficiency and efficiency of the process are greatly increased.

These pipes not only improve heat transfer by reducing energy consumption, but also prevent problems such as sediment accumulation in the pipes and cause the internal fluid to overflow and increase the transfer rate and ultimately reduce heat in the shortest time. Energy equation is activated to obtain temperature distribution inside the computational domain. Since in this analysis the resulting from the movement of fluid on the surfaces of the heat exchanger is very important, SST k-omega model is exploited to solve turbulent flow equations and the ideal gas model has been used to determine the density changes in proportion to temperature.

Finned Tube Heat Exchanger Geometry & Mesh

The geometry of this project is designed in ANSYS design modeler and meshed in ANSYS meshing software. The mesh type used for this geometry is structured in upstream and downstream part and unstructured in the main part. The element number is 890710. It should be mentioned that this geometry only consists of a segment of the heat exchanger and since a heat exchanger usually has symmetry, so we have tried to use this feature and instead of solving the flow in the whole heat exchanger, this analysis has been done only in a part of the heat exchanger.

Finned Tube Heat Exchanger CFD simulation settings

The key assumptions considered in this project are:

• Simulation uses pressure-based solver.
• The present simulation and its results are steady and do not change as a function time.
• The effect of gravity has not been taken into account.

The applied settings are summarized in the following table.

	Models
Viscous model		k-omega
	k-omega model	SST
Energy		on
	Boundary conditions
Inlet		Velocity inlet
	Inlet2	1.42 m/s
	Temperature	338 K
Outlet		Pressure outlet
	Gauge pressure	0 Pa
Walls		Stationary wall
Tube	Temperature	303 K
Vg	Heat flux	0 W/m2
Wall-part-core	Heat flux	0 W/m2
	Solution Methods
Pressure-velocity coupling		SIMPLE
Spatial discretization	Pressure	Second order
	Momentum	second order upwind
	Energy	second order upwind
	turbulent kinetic energy	first order upwind
	turbulent dissipation rate	first order upwind
	Initialization
Initialization method		Hybrid

Results

We obtain and present contours of pressure, velocity, temperature, etc. in both 3D and 2D.

All files, including Geometry, Mesh, Case & Data, are available in Simulation File. By the way, Training File presents how to solve the problem and extract all desired results.