COMPUTATIONAL FLUID DYNAMIC SIMULATION AND EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF AN OPTIMIZED SHELL AND TUBE HEAT EXCHANGER WITH CONSTANT HEAT TRANSFER COEFFICIENT

Abstract

The heat exchangers are widely used in different industrial applications, such as chemical industry, petroleum, thermal power, and so on. Fluid corrosion and fouling frequently damage shell and tube heat exchangers, resulting in leaks. In order to prevent the fluid losses and increase the efficiency, it is proposed to optimize an old shell and tube heat exchangers (STHE) used in the petroleum field in order to cool down the produced Methanol in petroleum production. Thermal modeling was used to optimize the design of a shell and tube heat exchanger using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Its heat transfer coefficient, pressure drop, and efficiency were calculated using the log-mean temperature difference (LMTD) method. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was performed to study the model of the inlet shell flow field. Our experimental findings show that the performance is around 35.29%. This means that the efficiency has increased by 9.6% of its previous efficiency and the pressure drops of the shell and tube side are 16.422 kPa and 54.262 kPa. The hot and cold fluid outlet temperatures, corrected LMTD and efficiency obtained from CFD simulations were in excellent agreement with experimental results, with an error of 3.6%.

Keywords

• heat exchanger
• lmtd
• cfd
• efficiency
• pressure drop