Due to their ease of manufacture, high heat transfer efficiency and compact design, helically coiled heat exchangers are increasingly being adopted in a number of industries. The higher heat transfer efficiency over straight pipes is due to the secondary flow that develops as a result of the centrifugal force. In spite of the widespread use of helically coiled heat exchangers, and the presence of bubbly two-phase flow in a number of systems, very few studies have investigated the resultant flow characteristics. This paper will therefore present the results of CFD simulations for the two-phase bubbly flow in helically coiled heat exchangers as a function of the volumetric void fraction and the tube cross-section design. The CFD results are compared to the scarce flow visualisation experimental results available in the open literature.
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