Numerical study of shellside performance of heat transfer and flow resistance for heat exchanger with trefoil-hole baffles

摘要

Trefoil-hole baffles have good thermo-hydraulic performances as the support of heat pipes, however the published research paper is relatively limited. The present paper investigates the shellside thermo-hydraulic characteristics of shell-and-tube heat exchanger with trefoil-hole baffles (THB-STHX) under turbulent flow region, and the variations of shellside Nusselt number, pressure loss and overall thermo-hydraulic performance (PEC) with Reynolds number are obtained for baffles of varied pitch with the numerical method. CFD results demonstrate that the trefoil-hole baffle could enhance the heat transfer rate of shell side effectively, and the maximal average Nusselt number is augmented by ～2.3 times that of no baffle, while average pressure loss increases by ～9.6 times. The PEC value of shell side lies in the range of 16.3 and 73.8 kPa~(-1), and drops with the increment of Reynolds number and the decrement of baffle pitch, which indicates that the heat exchanger with trefoil-hole baffles of larger pitch could generate better overall performance at low Reynolds number. Moreover, the contours of velocity, turbulent intensity and temperature are presented for discussions. It is found that shellside high-speed jet, intensive recirculation flow and high turbulence level could enhance the heat transfer rate effectively. Besides good performance, THB-STHXs are easily manufactured, thus promise widely applied in various industries.