Numerical Simulation of Fluid Flow and Heat Transfer in Finned Tube Heat Exchanger: Comparison of Two Different Designs

Abstract

The performance of an automobile engine depends on the adequate heat rejection through the radiator assembly. Despite of the existence of well-known theoretical models for various heat transfer applications, design of heat exchanger devices demands tremendous experimental work and effort.This study concerns the use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to analyze the heat transfer and fluid flow in finned tube heat exchangers which are widely used in automotive industries. Here, two different types of the finned tube heat exchangers were studied using the Star-CCM+ commercial CFD package. Because of the symmetric nature of the geometry, only a single fin was considered in simulations. Two different designs of finned tube heat exchanger were considered in the analysis and major attention was given to the fin configurations, louvers number and louvers angle.Although the contact surface of the fin to the coolant tube is different, the thermal performance was not affected under present steady state analysis. Pressure drop and heat rejection of both fin designs were compared and discussed at various air flow speed representing different vehicle velocity. Also, the simulation results were compared to the test data and good agreement was observed.