engleski

Numerical Modelling of the Air-Side Flow and Heat Transfer Characteristics of Slotted Fin and Tube Heat Exchangers

Compact air-cooled fin and tube heat exchangers find applications in many areas such as automotive industry, computer industry, heating, air-conditioning and refrigeration applications, process industry etc. Because of the physical properties of air, dominant thermal resistance is found on the air side of a heat exchanger. This is why the researches of fin and tube heat exchangers are mostly focused on improving the air-side performances of heat exchangers. Many works on this subject can be found in the literature where different fin and tube geometries are proposed for designing a fin and tube heat exchanger [1, 2]. In this work, numerical modelling of a 3D, laminar, steady state air-side flow and heat transfer characteristics of a slotted fin and tube heat exchanger has been done using the finite volume method. The convection-diffusion terms are discretized using Power Law scheme, and for pressure and velocity coupling the SIMPLE algorithm was used. Numerical calculations were performed in ANSYS Fluent 18.2. Four different inlet air velocities were considered ranging from 1 to 4 m/s which corresponds to Reynolds numbers ranging from 558 to 2233. Both inlet air temperature and temperatures of tube surfaces were constant. They were 293 K and 373 K respectively. Good agreement was observed with published results [1] in terms of Nusselt vs Reynolds numbers comparison.

Heat exchanger, Slotted fin and tube, Numerical analysis

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