Analysis of Backward and Forward Effects on a Grooved Co-axial Heat Exchanger by Response Surface Methodology

Abstract

In the literature, it is proved that grooved pipe models are thermally more efficient than the smooth pipe model. Different than the previous studies in which the groove dimensions are constant along the pipe, we study the effect of groove radius and the gap between adjacent grooves on the local heat transfer coefficients using computational fluid dynamics software. The grooved section consists of three sub-sections to see the effects of groove dimension in stream-wise flow direction. We vary the radius of circular grooves parametrically in each section to optimize the local groove radius throughout the pipe. We couple the fluid flow (1200<Re<24000) with energy equations, and the grooved sections are set as heated wall at constant temperature of 350 K. The optimal mesh has been selected by performing mesh independence study and finer mesh has been used in heated wall section. The radii of grooves are varied from 2 to 6 mm with an increment of 0.2 mm considering the manufacturability of the pipe, to do so we use the design of experiments (DOE). All DOE tools in ANSYS software are examined and compared with full factorial results. After DOE process, local heat transfer coefficient values of all groove parts are examined by response surface methodology (RSM).