ABSTRACT
Tube-and-shell heat exchangers are the most widely used heat exchanges in petroleum,
chemical and other industries today, which are with simple structure, secure and stable
performance and mature technology. Fluid flow and heat transfer performance optimization
in the shell side has a leading role in the improvement of the overall performance of the
heat exchanger, so research the new efficient shell-and-tube heat exchangers and study their
flow and temperature fields in the shell side is particularly important.
On the basis of the existing shell and tube heat exchangers, a new kind of
shell-and-tube heat exchanger is developed —a heat exchanger with blade-typed baffles.
The main work focuses on the structure is optimization of the shell side, in order to achieve
the purpose of optimizing the flow and heat transfer performance. After creating geometric
model, choose the Realizable k-ε solving model, standard wall function method and
SIMPLE algorithm and do numerical simulation in Fluent. In order to study the impact of
different geometric structures to the performance under different Reynolds numbers, by
changing the structural parameters, such as the number of baffles, blade numbers, and
length of heat tube , simulate corresponding flow and temperature fields under every
structure . 6 different models of heat exchangers with a blade-type baffle were built in this
paper. Each model was simulated under 7 kinds of conditions. Lots of basic data were
obtained. Based on the simulated data, the mechanism of heat transfer enhancement was
analyzed. The main conclusions are as follows:
1) The heat exchanger with blade-type separator structure is very complex, so the work
of meshing is quite difficult. Ultimately one software of meshing ——ICEM was used, and
both quantity and quality of the grid can meet the requirements of numerical computing.
2) There are triple helix flow in the shell side fluid of blade-type separator heat
exchanger, and the distribution of velocity, pressure and temperature present periodical
fluctuations with the changes of structure in the shell side.
3) Change the number of baffles. When the baffles’ number are 10, 8, and 5, the
corresponding space between adjacent baffles are 80mm, 100mm and 160mm ,respectively,
create a physical model and do the CFD simulation, obtained the data of flow rate,
temperature and pressure field under variety of different structures. Then results show that
when the separation distance is 160mm, the overall performance of the shell-and-tube heat
exchanger is the best.
4) Change the number of blades. When the baffle is composed of three blades and two
blades, simulate respectively, and obtained the corresponding velocity, temperature and
pressure field. The simulation results show that the shape of the baffle produced a
significant impact on the performance of the heat exchanger. When the separator are 3, the
heat transfer coefficients and pressure drop are larger, but the heat transfer coefficient
increased with a larger extent than pressure drop, so we can draw the conclusion that heat
exchanger performance of the baffle with 3 blades corresponds is superior to the two ones..
5) Change the total length of the tubes, crate the mode and do numerical simulation of
the length of 800mm and 640mm, respectively, and obtain the data of the flow field and
temperature, pressure field. The results show that when L is 800mm, the overall
performance of heat exchanger is better.
6) For various simulation data of different structures, h/P and the unit number of
entropy generation Ns were selected as performance evaluation parameter from the point of
the first and the second law of thermodynamics in this article. And we draw the conclusion
that entropy generation caused by heat transfer because of temperature difference dominates