Effect of fin spacing on convection in a plate fin and tube heat exchanger

By R. Romero-Méndez, Mihir Sen, Kwang-tzu Yang, R. McClain. 2000

167 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract We examine the influence of fin spacing on the over-tube side of a single-row fin-tube heat exchanger through flow visualization and numerical computation. The distance between fins is nondimensionalized by the tube diameter. If this parameter is small, the flow is Hele-Shaw; as it is increased, a horseshoe vortex is formed just upstream of the tube; a separated region is then developed behind the tube; this becomes larger and eventually communicates with the fluid downstream of the heat exchanger. A peak in the Nusselt number occurs at the horseshoe vortex. In the wake region the Nusselt number is very small but increases when there is fluid exchange with that downstream. The ratio of the overall Nusselt number per unit length to the nondimensional pressure drop is found to show a maximum.

Subfields: Computational Mechanics, Mechanical Engineering, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7145ea61f9cc04c28816b448aa367ee97104c5f7

Citations in the corpus

• Effect of geometrical parameters on heat transfer and pressure drop characteristics of plate fin and tube heat exchangers (2005, unknown): “[11] investigated the effect of the distance between two fins on the total heat transfer rate and pressure drop for a single row fin and tube heat exchanger by using flow visualization and numerical computation techniques.”