ON THE MODELING OF PERFORMANCE OF HEAT EXCHANGER TUBE FITTED WITH SWIRL INSERTS

The present paper validated the experimental results of turbulent flow in a plain tube with the numerical results that performed in this paper using standard k-ε, RNG k-ε, Realizable k-ε, and SST k-ω turbulence model. The validation shows that an excellent agreement between the numerical results using SST k-ω turbulence model and the experimental results. The effect of the twisted tape with rod (TTR) on the heat transfer rate, friction factor, and the performance evaluation criteria (PEC) are numerically investigated and are compared with those obtained numerically by a heat exchanger plain tube and tube fitted with the typical twisted tapes (TT). ANSYS Fluent16 is the computational fluid dynamic (CFD) software used in this paper.

The comparisons reveal to that, the Nusselt number values of the tube fitted with TTR are more than those obtained by the plain tube, and they increase as the twisted tape ratio decrease. The thermal performance factor of the tube fitted with TTR of twisted ratio=1.75 reach to 1.29 at Re=2000 that is more than that of the TT by 16%, where the friction factor obtained by TTR is less than that obtained by tube fitted with TT.