Abstract
An experimental investigation of shell-side flow condensation was performed on advanced three-dimensional surface-enhanced tubes, including a herringbone micro-fin tube and a newly-developed 1-EHT tube. An equivalent plain tube was also tested for performance comparison. All the test tubes have similar geometry parameters (inner diameter 11.43mm, outer diameter 12.7mm). Tests were conducted using R410A as the working fluid at a condensation saturation temperature of 45·C, covering the mass flux range of 10-55 kg/(m2·s) with an inlet quality of 0.8 and an outlet quality of 0.1. Experimental results showed that the plain tube exhibits a better condensation heat transfer performance when compared to the enhanced tubes. Moreover, the mass flux has a significant influence on the best transfer coefficient for shell-side condensation. A new prediction model based on the Cavallini's equation was developed to predict the condensing coefficient where the mean absolute error is less than 4%.
