CFD Application on Shell and Double Concentric Tube Heat Exchanger

Abstract

This work is concerned with the design and performance evaluation of a shell and double concentric tubes heat exchanger using Solid Works and ANSY (Computational Fluid Dynamics). Computational fluid dynamics technique which is a computer-based analysis is used to simulate the heat exchanger involving fluid flow, heat transfer. CFD resolve the entire heat exchanger in discrete elements to find: (1) the temperature gradients, (2) pressure distribution, and (3) velocity vectors. The RNG k-ε model of turbulence is used to determining the accurate results from CFD. The heat exchanger design for this work consisted of a shell and eight double concentric tubes. The number of inlets are three and that of outlets are also three for all the fluids that pass through the heat exchanger. A comparison was made for the numerical and experimental results and it was found that the percentage error for the hot oil outlet temperature was (6.8%) and the percentage error was (- 21%) for cold water outlet temperature.

Keywords

• CFD ; shell-and-double concentric tube; heat exchanger; performance study; numerical simulation.