Analysis and Experiment on the Air-side Heat Transfer Model of Cylindrical Fin-and-tube Heat Exchanger

Abstract

A theoretical analysis on the air-side flow characteristics of cylindrical fin-and-tube heat exchanger was carried out. Based on the existing heat transfer model, a correlation formula of lumped parameters, which can reflect the structural characteristics of the cylindrical fin-and-tube heat exchanger, was proposed. The heat transfer factors of the cylindrical and common types were experimentally studied and the theoretical analysis was verified. The average relative error of the existing heat exchanger model was 81.16% for the cylindrical heat exchanger, while that of the traditional heat exchanger was 7.53%. The average relative error of the new correlation was only 8.86% for the cylindrical heat exchanger and 8.80% for the traditional heat exchanger, and the error distribution was uniform, which indicates that the prediction accuracy of new correlation is significantly improved for the cylindrical heat exchanger and maintained for the traditional heat exchanger.

Keywords

• fin-and-tube heat exchanger
• heat transfer factor
• experimental correlation
• variable structure analysis