CFD Application on Shell and Double Concentric Tube Heat Exchanger

Abstract

This work is concerned with the design and performance evaluation of a shell and double concentric tubes heat exchanger using Solid Works and ANSY (Computational Fluid Dynamics). Computational fluid dynamics technique which is a computer-based analysis is used to simulate the heat exchanger involving fluid flow, heat transfer. CFD resolve the entire heat exchanger in discrete elements to find: (1) the temperature gradients, (2) pressure distribution, and (3) velocity vectors. The RNG k-ε model of turbulence is used to determining the accurate results from CFD.The heat exchanger design for this work consisted of a shell and eight double concentric tubes. The number of inlets are three and that of outlets are also three for all the fluids that pass through the heat exchanger.A comparison was made for the numerical and experimental results and it was found that the percentage error for the hot oil outlet temperature was (6.8%) and the percentage error was (- 21%) for cold water outlet temperature.