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Article history: For the purpose of heat transfer enhancement, the conguration of a shell-and-tube heat exchanger was
Received 6 June 2008 improved through the installation of sealers in the shell-side. The gaps between the bafe plates and shell
Accepted 15 December 2008 is blocked by the sealers, which effectively decreases the short-circuit ow in the shell-side. The results of
Available online 24 December 2008
heat transfer experiments show that the shell-side heat transfer coefcient of the improved heat exchan-
ger increased by 18.225.5%, the overall coefcient of heat transfer increased by 15.619.7%, and the
Keywords: exergy efciency increased by 12.914.1%. Pressure losses increased by 44.648.8% with the sealer instal-
Shell-and-tube heat exchanger
lation, but the increment of required pump power can be neglected compared with the increment of heat
Sealer
Bafe-shell leakage ow
ux. The heat transfer performance of the improved heat exchanger is intensied, which is an obvious
Heat transfer enhancement benet to the optimizing of heat exchanger design for energy conservation.
2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1359-4311/$ - see front matter 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.applthermaleng.2008.12.008
2434 S. Wang et al. / Applied Thermal Engineering 29 (2009) 24332438
Nomenclature
the apparent overall heat transfer coefcient, which is based on the ow modes in the shell. A is cross ow of uid through the tube
ideal plug ow model. This reduction will be even greater when the bundle. B is the ow through the gaps of segmental bafes and C
tube-side Reynolds number increases. Roetzel and Lee [11] studied is the shell-bafe leakage ow (short-circuit ow).
experimentally the inuence of bafe-shell leakage ow on the
thermal performance in bafed shell-and-tube heat exchangers 2.2. Flow mode of improved heat exchanger
with different distances between bafes. The results have shown
that bafe-shell leakage ow causes a reduction in the thermal per- The so called conguration improvement is to install sealers on
formance. This reduction increases as the tube-side Reynolds num- each bafe in order to block the bafe-shell gap. The ow distribu-
ber increases, and the distance between bafes decreases. Li and tion for bafed shell-side ow of improved heat exchanger is
Kottke [12] performed experiments to determine the response of shown in Fig. 2. There are only two kinds of ow modes (A and
the pressure drop and local heat transfer on the shell-side of shell- B) after the installation of sealers. The ow mode of C is prevented,
and-tube heat exchangers to a change in the leakage between bafes and this part of uid is forced to join modes A and B to participate
and shell in the fully developed regime. They found that the leakage in heat exchange.
between bafes and shell can greatly reduce the pressure drop and As to the shell-and-tube heat exchanger AES300-2.5-10-3/25-2
the per-compartment average heat transfer coefcient. They found used in the experiment, the cross-sectional area of the bafe-shell
that bafe-shell leakage reduces greatly the heat transfer by 17 gap (circular ow passage) engages about 1/6 of the total ow area
21% among their experimental Reynolds range. in shell-side. At the same pressure head, the ux inside two ow
All the above research results demonstrate that the bafe-shell passages relates to not only the ow area but also the resistance in-
leakage is negative for the improvement of the heat transfer in side the ow passages. The circular ow passage through the gap is
shell-and-tube heat exchangers. However, there is still an apparent short and straight, which causes little resistance. While the ow
lack of literature on the topic of conguration improvements of passage within the tube bundle is Z-shaped and long, which results
shell-and-tube heat exchangers to decrease the leakage ow. For in more resistance. Thus the unit area ux in the short-circuit ow
manufacturing reasons, the internal diameter of the shell is always passage is larger than that of the other one. So the sealers may
bigger than the external diameter of tube bundle for the successful block more than 1/6 of all the ux in the shell. The effect of the
installation. So according to the GB151 national standards of China, bafe-shell leakage ow on the thermal performance cannot be
there is always a circular gap of around 37 mm between the shell
and tube bundle for the shell-and-tube heat exchangers with diam-
eter between 400 and 2000 mm. And with the development of larger
heat exchangers, the gap will increase accordingly. A part of the uid
C C
in the shell will ow through the gap and does not participate into
B
heat exchange, thus diminishing thermal performance of the heat
exchangers. Hence experimental investigation is performed in this
paper to effectively decrease the shell-bafe leakage ow through
the conguration improvement of shell-and-tube heat exchanger. A A
2. Conguration improvement
The ow modes of the conventional shell-and-tube heat Fig. 1. Schematic ow distribution for bafed shell-side ow of conventional heat
exchangers are demonstrated in Fig. 1. There are three types of exchanger.
S. Wang et al. / Applied Thermal Engineering 29 (2009) 24332438 2435
3.5 tem has achieved a fully developed ow. Only the experimental
data indicating that the thermal leakage is within 3.0% are seen
3.0 as valid, otherwise they are discarded.
2.5
4. Results and discussion
2.0
4.1. Effect of sealer on heat transfer coefcient
E/mv
1.5
The overall heat transfer Q is as follows:
1.0 Q W h C p;h DT h W c C p;h DT c 2
600 50
Oil-side heat-transfer coefficient W/m K
2
with sealer
500
without sealer 40
Increase percentage (%)
400
30
300
20
200
increase percentage
100 10
100 150 200 250 300
Fig. 5. Schematic gure of tube distribution. Fig. 6. Oil-side heat transfer coefcient a0 versus shell-side ux.
S. Wang et al. / Applied Thermal Engineering 29 (2009) 24332438 2437
500 40 crease of ow rate. Thus the pressure drops in the improved heat
Overall heat transfer coefficient (W/m .K)
exchanger increase.
2
with sealer 35
400
without sealer 4.3. The effect of sealers on pump power consumption
100 10 N e DP V 6
100 150 200 250 300
where Ne is denoted as pump power consumption. DP is shell-side
Shell-side flux (L/min) pressure drop. And V is denoted shell-side volume ow.
Fig. 7. Overall heat transfer coefcient K versus shell-side ux. Fig. 9 demonstrates the effects of sealers on pump power con-
sumption. The increased thermal ux and the increased pump
power consumption all increases with shell-side ux. The operat-
exchange. The shell-side circulation area decreases and the ing condition of the largest shell-side pressure drop was chosen.
shell-side ow rate increases accordingly. Thus the shell-side heat At this point, the increased thermal ux is 11.8 kW and the in-
transfer performance of improved heat exchanger is effectively creased pump power consumption is 7.8 W. This difference is
enhanced, bringing about an obvious increase in shell-side heat about three orders of magnitude. The increment of thermal ux
transfer coefcient a0 and overall coefcient of heat transfer K. is among 6.411.7 kW and the increment of pump power con-
sumption is among 0.77.8 W under the operating conditions.
4.2. The effect of sealers on shell-side pressure drops The increased thermal ux is far and away larger compared with
the increased pump power consumption. Hence the increased
The variation of shell-side pressure drops along with ux is pump power consumption by means of the installation of sealers
demonstrated in Fig. 8. As shown in the gure, the pressure drop can be neglected, which is more than compensated for by the in-
4P increases with the shell-side ux. And the pressure drops of im- crease of heat ux.
proved heat exchanger are always higher than the conventional
one. When shell-side ux is 150 L/min, the shell-side pressure drop 4.4. The effect of sealers on the exergy coefcient
is 7.8 mmHg before the conguration improvement and 11 mmHg
after. The pressure drop increased by about 44.8%. When ux in- From the former mentioned experimental results, it can be seen
creases to 306 L/min, the pressure drop increases from 25.7 mmHg that the thermal performance of the improved heat exchanger is
of conventional heat exchanger to 37.2 mmHg of improved with notably enhanced by the addition of sealers. However, there is an
sealers, which increases by 48.8%. Within the operating conditions, increase in ow resistance, which results in the increase of irre-
the pressure drops increase by 44.648.8%. The installation of seal- versible loss in the thermodynamic process. Exergy analysis is
ers deletes the short-circuit ow and urges this part of uid to ow based on second law of thermodynamics. According to the equilib-
across the tube bundle and bafes to exchange heat with water in rium of exergy, the exergy is converted, transferred, used and lost
the tubes. The pressure drop of the original short-circuit ow in- during the heat exchange process. The thermal performance of
creases for the above variation of ow passage. The shell-side cir- heat exchanger can be analyzed and evaluated through the aspect
culation area decreases by means of the block of sealers and the of energy quality. The integrative thermal performance of heat
shell-side average ow rate increases. The pressure drop caused exchangers is compared using the parameter of exergy coefcient.
by the frictional resistance along the passages increases by the in-
20
Increment of pump power consumption (W)
40 70
12 increase of thermal flux
Increment of thermal flux (kW)
30
with sealer
without sealer
Increase percentage (%)
60
10
12
20 55
8
50 8
10
45
4
0 6
40
increase percentage
0
-10 35 100 150 200 250 300
100 150 200 250 300
Shell-side flux (L/min)
shell-side flux (L/min)
Fig. 9. Increment of pump power consumption and thermal ux versus shell-side
Fig. 8. Shell-side pressure drop versus shell-side ux. ux.
2438 S. Wang et al. / Applied Thermal Engineering 29 (2009) 24332438
The exergy coefcient of heat exchanger versus shell-side ux is The paper is supported by the National Natural Science Founda-
shown in Fig. 10. Under the xed tube-side inlet condition, the tion of China (NSFC 50676074) and grammatically revised by Dy-
oil-side heat transfer coefcient a0 (Fig. 6) and shell-side tempera- lan Thorpe from RMIT of Australia, for which the authors are
ture difference of heat transfer increase with the increase of shell- thankful.
side ux, which intensies the heat transfer within heat exchanger.
However, the increase of shell-side ux increases the ow resis- References
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