In this paper, a simple yet efficient performance comparison method is proposed based on the assumptions of constant properties and identical frontal area. For this method, no correlations are required, and a small number of discrete data are sufficient. To illustrate the feasibility of the proposed approach, a new slotted fin with 4 mm tubes is designed to replace the original louvered fin with tubes of 7 mm. The orthogonal design method is adopted in the fin design to reduce the number of computational cases significantly, and yet a nearly optimum combination of major geometric factors can still be obtained. The reasonable parametric combination of 3 global parameters is obtained by analyzing the numerical results of 16 plain plate fins. Based on this result, 3 new slotted fins with different fin pitches are studied. The slotted fin with a fin pitch of 1.4 mm is recommended after considering the heat transfer, comprehensive performance, and cost of material and operation. The result shows that compared with the original louvered fin, the recommended fin not only increases the heat transfer rate by 2.2%, 22.5%, and 13.7% under an identical flow rate, identical pressure drop, and identical pumping power constraint, respectively, but also saves approximately 36% of the copper tube materials.
A new installation for improving the efficiency of the air cooled condenser (ACC) heat exchange has been proposed in a patent and its performance is investigated in current paper. This installation can be used in air-cooled condenser power plants. The installation is simple and it is designed to be installed around ACC platform. The installation is called "ACC protecting shield". The performance of "ACC protecting shield" is investigated by CFD simulation. A series of wind environment conditions are simulated. The simulation results show that there would be significant improvements of the heat exchange efficiency when the installation is applied. The improvements include two aspects: first, flow rate of ACC fans would enhance. And second, plume recirculation would relieve. For 2m/s wind velocity condition, the average temperature of fans' inlet will drop remarkably (more than 0.78K), and the fans' flow rate will increase more than 1% .
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