An Investigation of Heat Transfer and Pressure Drop Enhancement of Various Perforated Circular Finned Tubes at Different Tube Tilt Angles

Abstract

The thermal and flow performance of the circular annular finned tube heat exchanger with perforated fins were investigated numerically using ANSYS Fluent 2020 software, RNG k-e model with enhanced wall treatment, global performance criterion was introduced as evaluation factor of the heat exchanger performance, the parameters to be investigated were the number of holes, size of hole, tilt angle of the finned tube, fin height and spacing between fins. Agreement was found with literature that the tilt angle causes increase in heat transfer rate and increase in the pressure drop as well, but the change the global performance criterion as function to tilt angle depends on the fin heights, for higher fin heights the effective change of the pressure drop become greater than the increase in the heat transfer rate and the contrast occur in the cases of smaller fin heights, we have found that the perforation in tilted annular circular finned tubes causes an increase in the heat transfer rate and an enhancement in the total heat exchanger performance, increasing the number of holes will enhance the performance of the heat exchanger and the spacing increase reduces the heat exchanger performance.