• Comparison of Heat Transfer between a Circular and Rectangular Tube Heat Exchanger by using Ansys Fluent
• Author  :  Priyanka Bisht, Manish Joshi and Anirudh Gupta
• Pages   :  88-92
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• Abstract

Heat exchangers are the important equipments with a variety of industrial applications including power plants, chemical, refrigeration and air conditioning industries. Circular tube heat exchangers are used in order to obtain a large heat transfer area per unit volume and to enhance the heat transfer coefficient on the inside surface. This paper deals with the CFD simulation of circular tube heat exchanger used for cooling water under constant wall temperature conditions. CFD results are compared with the results obtained by the simulation of rectangular tube heat exchanger of the same length under identical operating conditions. The results are validated by the results obtained by the numerical correlations used by different researchers. Results indicated that circular pipe heat exchangers showed 2.5% increase in the heat transfer rate over the rectangular tube. Simulation results also showed 8.5% increase in Nusselt number for the circular tube whereas pressure drop in case of circular tube is higher when compared to the rectangular tube.

Keywords: Heat Exchanger, Ansys Fluent etc.

Article published in International Journal of Thermal Technologies, Vol.4, No.2 (June- 2014)