Numerical investigation of thermal and hydraulic performance of fin and flat tube heat exchanger with various aspect ratios

Thermohydraulic Performance of a Fin and Inclined Flat Tube Heat Exchanger: A Numerical Analysis

“…However, the symmetry boundary condition has been applied in this study to reduce the number of grids which leads to a reduction in computation time. Fin and tube surfaces are maintained the fixed temperature of Ts = 373 K while the inlet air temperature is Tin = 298 K [14,18]. Atmospheric pressure was applied to the outlet of the computational domain.…”

“…Figure 3 shows the grid generation performed in this study. The hexahedral element was selected in this work due to its uniformity and smooth which ensure numerical prediction and computational cost [18]. The numerical computation was performed in ANSYS fluent 19.2 software installed in the workstation desktop computer equipped with Intel Xeon CPU E5-2678 v3, 2.50 GHz, 24 cores, 48 threads (2 processors) and 32 GB RAM.…”

“…The problem is numerically solved with the following assumptions i. Steady-state conditions and negligible radiation ii. Fin temperature is uniform and equals to the temperature of tube surface [14,18] iii. Airflow is assumed to be incompressible iv.…”

“…where A is flow cross-sectional area ở inlet, and cp is specific heat of the air. Heat transfer coefficient is calculated from heat transfer equation as [18] ℎ = ∆ (10) where As is the surface area of fin and tube, and ∆ is the logarithmic mean temperature difference…”

“…The numerical results show that the thermal performance is increased by 52% compared to the finned flat tube without vortex generator. The most recently, Alnakeeb et al, [18] numerically investigated flat tubes with six different aspect ratios from 0.33 to 1 to show their influence on the thermo-hydraulic properties. The results demonstrate that the performance index is increased by 42% compared with the circular tube.…”