A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF FLOW AND HEAT TRANSFER CHARACTERISTICS OF STAGGERED AND IN-LINE CROSS-FLOW TUBE-TYPE HEAT EXCHANGERS, PART II: THE FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS

Numerical analysis of fluid flow and heat transfer were performed for cross-flow tube-type heat exchanger in staggered and in-line arrangement. The purpose of this project was to simulate the process of forced convection heat transfer of air over a heated cylindrical pure copper rod using finite element scheme and compared the results with experimentally obtained data. Also, the work was to compare the performance of both staggered and in-line tube bundle configurations. The cross-flow tube-type heat exchangers consist of 25 mm transverse pitch, 18.75 mm longitudinal pitch, 20 cylindrical rods of Ø12.5 mm in a 125 x 125 mm cross section. Finite element simulation was carried out by modeling the working sections of the cross flow heat exchangers. In this, Model geometry was created, meshed, calculated, and postprocessed using FEMLAB 3.0 for ten different air inlet velocities corresponding to experimental data obtained. The simulation results revealed 29.77% and 25.31% deviation in Nusselt number from experimental results for staggered and in-line tube bank respectively