Numerical Simulation of Manifold Microchannel Heat Exchanger

Author(s):  
Muhammad Ansab Ali ◽  
Tariq S. Khan ◽  
Ebrahim Al Hajri

The quest to achieve higher heat transfer rate, smaller size and minimum pressure drop is a main area of focus in the design of heat exchangers. Plate heat exchangers are one of viable candidates to deliver higher heat duties but still have a drawback of higher pressure drop due to long restricted flow path. Motivated by demand of miniaturization and cost reduction, a novel design of tubular microchannel heat exchanger for single phase flow employing ammonia water mixture is proposed. Numerical simulation of unit fluid domain is conducted in ANSYS Fluent. Parametric study of the different flow geometries is evaluated in terms of Nusselt number and pressure drop. The salient features of the design include ultra-compact size with higher heat transfer rate and acceptable pressure drop.

2013 ◽  
Vol 465-466 ◽  
pp. 500-504 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shahrin Hisham Amirnordin ◽  
Hissein Didane Djamal ◽  
Mohd Norani Mansor ◽  
Amir Khalid ◽  
Md Seri Suzairin ◽  
...  

This paper presents the effect of the changes in fin geometry on pressure drop and heat transfer characteristics of louvered fin heat exchanger numerically. Three dimensional simulation using ANSYS Fluent have been conducted for six different configurations at Reynolds number ranging from 200 to 1000 based on louver pitch. The performance of this system has been evaluated by calculating pressure drop and heat transfer coefficient. The result shows that, the fin pitch and the louver pitch have a very considerable effect on pressure drop as well as heat transfer rate. It is observed that increasing the fin pitch will relatively result in an increase in heat transfer rate but at the same time, the pressure drop will decrease. On the other hand, low pressure drop and low heat transfer rate will be obtained when the louver pitch is increased. Final result shows a good agreement between experimental and numerical results of the louvered fin which is about 12%. This indicates the capability of louvered fin in enhancing the performance of heat exchangers.


2013 ◽  
Vol 388 ◽  
pp. 149-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mazlan Abdul Wahid ◽  
Ahmad Ali Gholami ◽  
H.A. Mohammed

In the present work, laminar cross flow forced convective heat transfer of nanofluid over tube banks with various geometry under constant wall temperature condition is investigated numerically. We used nanofluid instead of pure fluid ,as external cross flow, because of its potential to increase heat transfer of system. The effect of the nanofluid on the compact heat exchanger performance was studied and compared to that of a conventional fluid.The two-dimensional steady state Navier-Stokes equations and the energy equation governing laminar incompressible flow are solved using a Finite volume method for the case of flow across an in-line bundle of tube banks as commercial compact heat exchanger. The nanofluid used was alumina-water 4% and the performance was compared with water. In this paper, the effect of parameters such as various tube shapes ( flat, circle, elliptic), and heat transfer comparison between nanofluid and pure fluid is studied. Temperature profile, heat transfer coefficient and pressure profile were obtained from the simulations and the performance was discussed in terms of heat transfer rate and performance index. Results indicated enhanced performance in the use of a nanofluid, and slight penalty in pressure drop. The increase in Reynolds number caused an increase in the heat transfer rate and a decrease in the overall bulk temperature of the cold fluid. The results show that, for a given heat duty, a mas flow rate required of the nanofluid is lower than that of water causing lower pressure drop. Consequently, smaller equipment and less pumping power are required.


2015 ◽  
Vol 787 ◽  
pp. 72-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. Naveen Prabhu ◽  
M. Suresh

Nanofluids are fluids containing nanometer-sized particles of metals, oxides, carbides, nitrides, or nanotubes. They exhibit enhanced thermal performance when used in a heat exchanger as heat transfer fluids. Alumina (Al2O3) is the most commonly used nanoparticle due to its enhanced thermal conductivity. The work presented here, deals with numerical simulations performed in a tube-in-tube heat exchanger to study and compare flow characteristics and thermal performance of a tube-in-tube heat exchanger using water and Al2O3/water nanofluid. A local element-by-element analysis utilizing e-NTU method is employed for simulating the heat exchanger. Profiles of hot and cooling fluid temperatures, pressure drop, heat transfer rate along the length of the heat exchanger are studied. Results show that heat exchanger with nanofluid gives improved heat transfer rate when compared with water. However, the pressure drop is more, which puts a limit on the operating conditions.


SINERGI ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 51
Author(s):  
Sudiono Sudiono ◽  
Rita Sundari ◽  
Rini Anggraini

This preliminary investigation studied the effect of circular turbulator vortex generator on heat transfer rate and pressure drop in a circular channel countercurrent double pipe heat exchanger with water working fluid. Increasing the number of circular turbulator yielded increasing heat transfer rate and pressure drop. The problem generated when increased pressure drop occurred in relation to more energy consumption of the water pumping system. Therefore, optimization in circular turbulator number is necessary to minimize the pressure drop about distance length between circular turbulator, tube diameter and thickness, type of material and crystal lattice, as well as the geometrical shape of fluid passage (circular or square). This study applied PVC outer tube and copper alloy inner tube, as well as fiberglass circular turbulator. The optimum results showed that seven parts of circular turbulator increasing heat transfer rate by 30% and pressure drop by 80% compared to that passage in the absence of circular turbulator at cool water debit of 7 L/min.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1973 (1) ◽  
pp. 012113
Author(s):  
Zomorrod Ahmed Salman ◽  
Zena Khalefa Kadhim ◽  
Kamil Abdulhussein khalaf ◽  
Hassanein Ali Kamil

Energies ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 400
Author(s):  
Miftah Altwieb ◽  
Rakesh Mishra ◽  
Aliyu M. Aliyu ◽  
Krzysztof J. Kubiak

Multi-tube multi-fin heat exchangers are extensively used in various industries. In the current work, detailed experimental investigations were carried out to establish the flow/heat transfer characteristics in three distinct heat exchanger geometries. A novel perforated plain fin design was developed, and its performance was evaluated against standard plain and louvred fins designs. Experimental setups were designed, and the tests were carefully carried out which enabled quantification of the heat transfer and pressure drop characteristics. In the experiments the average velocity of air was varied in the range of 0.7 m/s to 4 m/s corresponding to Reynolds numbers of 600 to 2650. The water side flow rates in the tubes were kept at 0.12, 0.18, 0.24, 0.3, and 0.36 m3/h corresponding to Reynolds numbers between 6000 and 30,000. It was found that the louvred fins produced the highest heat transfer rate due to the availability of higher surface area, but it also produced the highest pressure drops. Conversely, while the new perforated design produced a slightly higher pressure drop than the plain fin design, it gave a higher value of heat transfer rate than the plain fin especially at the lower liquid flow rates. Specifically, the louvred fin gave consistently high pressure drops, up to 3 to 4 times more than the plain and perforated models at 4 m/s air flow, however, the heat transfer enhancement was only about 11% and 13% over the perforated and plain fin models, respectively. The mean heat transfer rate and pressure drops were used to calculate the Colburn and Fanning friction factors. Two novel semiempirical relationships were derived for the heat exchanger’s Fanning and Colburn factors as functions of the non-dimensional fin surface area and the Reynolds number. It was demonstrated that the Colburn and Fanning factors were predicted by the new correlations to within ±15% of the experiments.


Author(s):  
Michael Bichnevicius ◽  
David Saltzman ◽  
Stephen Lynch

Abstract Additive manufacturing (AM) enables improved heat exchanger (HX) designs where performance is based on the achievable geometry. However, consequences of the AM process that affect HX performance such as increased surface roughness, dimensional tolerance issues, and defects like cracks may vary among identically designed AM parts due to AM machine settings. This paper experimentally compares the thermal and hydraulic performance of three AM HXs built using a traditionally manufactured, stamped aluminum oil cooler design. The AM HXs exhibited significantly higher air-side pressure drop and higher heat transfer rate than the traditional HX in large part due to increased AM surface roughness. Among AM HXs, one AM HX had notably higher heat transfer rate and air-side pressure drop due to poor print quality on the thin air-side fin features. The fin thickness among AM HXs also varied by about 15%, and there were only slight differences in surface roughness. This study indicates that functional HXs built using AM vary in performance even when the same digital model is used to print them and that AM HXs as a group can perform considerably differently than their traditional counterparts.


2021 ◽  
pp. 10295-10338
Author(s):  
Yahya Yaser Shanyour AL-Salman, Ali Sabri Abbas

The thermal and flow performance of the circular annular finned tube heat exchanger with perforated fins were investigated numerically using ANSYS Fluent 2020 software, RNG k-e model with enhanced wall treatment, global performance criterion was introduced as evaluation factor of the heat exchanger performance, the parameters to be investigated were the number of holes, size of hole, tilt angle of the finned tube, fin height and spacing between fins. Agreement was found with literature that the tilt angle causes increase in heat transfer rate and increase in the pressure drop as well, but the change the global performance criterion as function to tilt angle depends on the fin heights, for higher fin heights the effective change of the pressure drop become greater than the increase in the heat transfer rate and the contrast occur in the cases of smaller fin heights, we have found that the perforation in tilted annular circular finned tubes causes an increase in the heat transfer rate and an enhancement in the total heat exchanger performance, increasing the number of holes will enhance the performance of the heat exchanger and the spacing increase reduces the heat exchanger performance.


Author(s):  
Ahmad Fakheri

In this paper, it is shown that the Arithmetic Mean Temperature Difference, which is the difference between the average temperatures of hot and cold fluids, can be used instead of the Log Mean Temperature Difference (LMTD) in heat exchanger analysis. For a given value of AMTD, there exists an optimum heat transfer rate, Qopt, given by the product of UA and AMTD such that the rate of heat transfer in the heat exchanger is always less than this optimum value. The optimum heat transfer rate takes place in a balanced counter flow heat exchanger and by using this optimum rate of heat transfer, the concept of heat exchanger efficiency is introduced as the ratio of the actual to optimum heat transfer rate. A general algebraic expression as well as a chart is presented for the determination of the efficiency and therefore the rate of heat transfer for parallel flow, counter flow, single stream, as well as shell and tube heat exchangers with any number of shells and even number of tube passes per shell. In addition to being more intuitive, the use of AMTD and the heat exchanger efficiency allow the direct comparison of the different types of heat exchangers.


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