NUMERICAL INVESTIGATION ON SHELL & TUBE HEAT EXCHANGER WITH SEGMENTAL AND HELIX BAFFLES

Shell and Tube heat exchangers are widely used in many industries as they are very efficient in exchanging heat between two or more fluids when compared to other types of Heat Exchangers. Various heat transfer augmentation techniques (passive, active or combination of both) are already present to enhance the heat transfer capability and were used mainly in many areas of process industries, refrigerators, thermal power plants, automobiles, etc. In this paper, a brief numerical comparison of shell & Tube heat exchangers is presented in detail representing the best possible augmented heat transfer along with heat transfer characteristics. For this, a shell & Tube heat exchanger with Helix baffle plate varying the pitch of helix, shell & tube heat exchanger with segmental baffle plate varying baffle spacing along with tubes with fins are targeted to enhance the maximum possible heat transfer. Finite volume numerical simulation is performed on the above three Heat exchangers using ANSYS Fluent version 17.2. Convergence criteria residuals of the order 10-6 are adopted for convergence acceleration. Mesh refinement is done until convergence is reached. Heat transfer coefficient, pressure (p) and Nusselt number (Nus) is visualized along the length of the heat exchanger. The heat exchanger which exhibits better performance characteristics compared to the other two types of Shell & Tube Heat Exchangers is to be selected for further applications to maximize the overall efficiency of the system