A novel way to design shell-and-tube heat exchangers based on the cell method

V.G.Ramanathan Ketan Anand Nayak April 16, 2009

Abstract

In this work, we present a novel technique to design shell and tube heat exchangers based on the cell method. The conventional cell method proposed by Gaddis makes the assumption that the tube side uid is mixed. Here, we introduce a technique which preserves the unmixed condition of the tube side uid during the analysis. This technique denes a cell to comprise of only one tube row. Since the tubes within each row suer equal temperature gradients, this technique gives the exact outlet temperatures at the end of the tube. Rather than a single mixed tube outlet temperature, we are now able to calculate the temperature prole at the outlet and provide insight into localized heat transfer occurring in the heat exchanger. Keywords: bae, cell method, tube bundle, eectiveness, multipass, crossow

Introduction

Shell-and-tube heat exchangers are the most common type of heat exchangers and are used in the chemical industry, power production, food industry, environment engineering, waste heat recovery, air-conditioning and refrigeration. They are not only simple to manufacture but also versatile, robust and reliable. Due to the important role of shell-and-tube-heat exchangers, several methods have been developed for their design. Of particular relevance to this work is the cell method of design proposed by Gaddis. This method can be used to design a single-phase multipass shell-and-tube heat exchanger with segmental baes. However, this method only yields the adiabatic mixing temperature at the tube outlet and does not recover the temperature prole across the shell diameter. In this work, we suggest an improved cell method that recovers the temperature prole at the tube outlet. This report is organized as follows. Section 3 gives an overview of the conventional cell method proposed by Gaddis. In section 4, we introduce the im-

proved cell method and sketch an outline of the procedure. Section 5 gives the step-by-step algorithm of the improved cell method.

Cell Method

Figure 1: A heat exchanger divided into a number of cells The cell method of analysis of a shell-and-tube heat exchanger was proposed by Gaddis in 1978. This method divides the heat exchanger into multiple interconnected cross-ow heat exchangers [4]. Figure 3 shows a shell-and-tube heat exchanger with a single tube pass and single shell pass. The inuence of the baes on the exchanger eectiveness and on the mean temperature dierence is ignored in most present thermal design calculations. This can be justied when 1. The number of baes is large, 2. Heat capacity rates C1 , and C2 , (C = M c) of the two streams dier greatly from one another, or 3. Number of Transfer Units (NTU) is small. If none of the above conditions are fullled, ignoring the bae-induced shellside ow gives a large error in computing the eectiveness of the heat exchanger. In such cases, it is possible to use numerical methods to evaluate the thermal performance of the apparatus. The heat exchanger can be divided into a number of cells (sub-exchangers) as shown in Fig. 1.

3.1

Assumptions in the Cell Method

The shell and tube heat exchanger can be described using a combination of connected heat exchangers in pure cross ow i. e, the ow in the shell side is at 90 to that in the tube side

 The leakage in the shell side ow through clearances between shell and bae and tube and bae are neglected. The ow is assumed to be uniformly distributed in the direction transverse to the ow, both for the shell side uid and tube side uid. The uid at the exit of each cell on both the sides is assumed to be completely mixed. This implies that the input temperature will be uniform in nature.

3.2

Division of the heat exchanger

The cell method requires the division of the shell and tube heat exchanger into a number of connected cross ow heat exchangers. For every tube pass, the space between adjacent baes is considered as a cell. This kind of a division is primarily done because the ow is locally cross-ow due to obstruction from baes. This kind of a division neglects any ow accounting for bae leakage, an assumption that has been made for this method. So the total number of cells in a heat exchanger is given by Number of Cells = (Number of tube passes) (Number of Baes) +1 So, for a shell and tube heat exchanger involving one pass on either side the number of cells is given by Number of Baes +1.

Figure 2: Cross sectional view of the arrangement of tubes

3.3

Calculation procedure for conventional cell method

In the cell method the solution of one cell will be the input to another cell. So the calculation procedure requires the cell to be treated as a separate entity with 3

a set of inputs and a set of outputs. The set of inputs may be the inlet conditions for the shell and tube heat exchanger or outlet condition of some other cell. The cross ow of the shell-side uid across the tube bank between two adjacent baes or between a bae and the adjacent tube sheet is regarded as one pass. This usage should be distinguished from the more general one shell-side pass, which means that the uid ows from one end of the shell to the other with baes treated as only a minor interruption of the basically one dimensional ow. Figure shows one of the heat exchanger cells considered separately. For calculation purposes, it is assumed in further calculations that stream 1 is the stream with the lower heat capacity rate. The following equations may be written in the steady state [1]
Qc = C1 (T1 T1 ) Qc = C2 (T2 T2 ) Qc = Ec C1 (T2 T1 )

where Ec is the the temperature eectiveness of the cell, given by, Ec =

T1 T1 T T2 1

Now we dene non dimensional temperatures given by = T T1i T2i T1i

where T1i and T2i are the heat exchanger inlet temperatures of stream 1 and 2 respectively. The non dimensional temperature varies between 0 and 1. and the dimensionless inlet temperatures are 1i = 0 and 2i = 1. Converting the above equations to the non dimensional form, we get the following equations = a + b 1 1 2 = e + f 2 2 1 where a = 1 Ec b = Ec e = 1 REc R= C1 (0 R 1) C2

The numerical value of the cell eectiveness Ec , will in a general case be dierent for each cell. It is assumed at this stage that the cell eectiveness is known. The constants a, b, e&f can be evaluated as the value of R is known. 4

These equations are applied to the Nc cells, then we obtain 2Nc equations, with 2Nc unknowns. These unknowns comprise of the output values of the temperature of both the streams for each cell. The inlet cell temperatures for each stream are the exit temperatures of the preceding cells, and the dimensionless inlet temperatures of the heat exchanger are known. The solution of the system of algebraic linear equations gives the required temperature distribution. The eectiveness E of the heat exchanger is by denition, E= T1o T1i = 1o T2i T1i (1)

where T1o is the outlet temperature of stream 1. The eectiveness of the heat exchanger is thus identical with the dimensionless heat exchanger outlet temperature of the stream with the lower heat capacity rate.

Figure 3: Flow arrangement in a single cell

3.4

Drawbacks

The conventional cell method as described in the above sections divides the heat exchanger into a number of connected cross-ow sub-exchangers each of which is solved to obtain the intermediate temperatures (the output temperatures of the cells). As shown above, each cell is considered to have two inlets (i.e. two input temperatures) and two outlets (the output temperatures). Physically each cell represents a localized region of the heat exchanger, in this case the localized region corresponds to the region between adjacent baes or between a bae and a tube end sheet . In a real scenario, considering a shell and tube heat exchanger, this region would comprise of a number of tubes in each cell in the tube side. The conventional cell method assumes a mixed-mixed condition for the uids on both sides. This assumption may hold true, for a certain extent, to the shell side uid (even though, real shell and tube heat exchangers do not have a completely mixed condition and gradients transverse to the ow are present in the shell side uid), this assumption is totally invalid for the tube side uid as physical barriers make it impossible for the tube side uid to achieve a well mixed condition(The uid moves in a number of tubes 5

and the tubes themselves prevent the mixing of the uids in the tube side). Also making the uid ow unmixed in the tube side will give insight into the gradients present in the tube side outlet temperature in each cell prompting for possibly, a better design. So the conventional cell method previously proposed just gives a very crude method of analyzing heat exchangers. This is because the consideration of mixing condition for the tube side. Considering gradients within each cell(tube side unmixed condition) will provide a more accurate analysis of the heat exchanger. So to overcome these drawbacks, in the following sections we propose a new, novel way of analysis, which preserves the unmixed condition of the ow on the tube side.

Improved Cell Method

In this section we propose a new method which helps us to calculate the temperatures for a unmixed-mixed scenario. This method is basically an extension of the regular cell method to include the temperature gradient in the tube side uid. In this method we dene the cell dierently. In the new system, a cell is dened to be the region between adjacent baes or a bae and a tube sheet, and containing exactly one tube row. This is contrasting to the earlier denition where in we considered the entire tube bundle to be a part of the cell. The reason why we have chosen the cell to contain only one tube row is that for the given cross ow condition, every tube corresponding to the same tube row will have the same outlet temperature. As a result of this we can now formulate the system into 2-input/2-output cells, while still obtaining a solution for the unmixed-mixed condition (temperature gradient in the tube side uid ow)

Figure 4: Cell division in the improved cell method Considering tube rows as cells instead of tubes will considerably simplify the situation from the case, where individual tubes are present in a cell (one tube per cell). To solve the given system, we need to develop an algorithm to solve for each of the cells in a similar way as done in the conventional method.

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5.1

Algorithm
Solution Algorithm for the Cell

The following section presents a calculation procedure to calculate the output temperatures from the given input temperatures. Initially we will know both the input temperatures only for one cell (i.e., the cell from where the shell side uid enters or exits the heat exchanger). Now an outline for the solution procedure is provided assuming that the input temperatures to the cell are known and the output temperatures are unknown. 1. Make suitable assumptions for bae spacing LB , shell diameter DS , tube outer diameter do , tube inner diameter di and the tube pitch in the staggered arrangement, PT . 2. Calculate the heat transfer coecient on the tube side for the shell using the appropriate correlations. For obtaining the heat transfer coecient we need to know the Reynolds number for the ow. The Reynolds number is given by, ReD = 1 V1 di , 1 (2)

where 1 is the density of the uid in the tube side and 1 is the viscosity of the tube side uid. The velocity V1 is given by V1 = m1 1 A1,cs Ntot (3)

assuming that the mass ow rate in the tube-side, m1 is equally divided among all the tubes. The area A1 denotes the cross-sectional area of the tube and is given by d2 i 4 Ntot , is the total number of tubes in the shell and is determined by using geometry as the values of do , PT and DS are already assumed and hence known. A1,cs = Based on the Reynolds number obtained, the corresponding Nusselt number correlation is used (laminar ow or turbulent ow). For laminar ow inside tubes Nusselt number is given by N uD = 3.66. (4)

If the value of the Reynolds number obtained is greater than 2100, the ow is classied as a turbulent ow, and Gnielinski correlation is used to obtain the Nusselt number, which is given by [2], 7

N uD =

(f /8)(ReD 1000)P r 1 + 12.7(f /8)1/2 (P r2/3 1)

(5)

where f is the friction factor and is obtained using f = (0.790lnReD 1.64)2 3000 ReD 5 106 (6)

P r is the Prandtl Number obtained from property charts. The tube side heat transfer coecient is obtained as h1 = di N u D K1 (7)

K1 is the value of the conductivity for the uid. 3. Heat Transfer Coecient on the shell side is found out using correlation for a bank of tubes for a staggered arrangement. To calculate this we need to calculate the maximum velocity in the tube rows (i.e. in each cell). This id one by considering the minimum area through which ow takes place. This area is given by the area of the plane containing the tube centers. This area is given by, A2 = Lc LB Nrow do LB (8)

Lc is the length of the chord passing through the centers of the tubes and Nrow is the number of tubes present in the particular cell Obtain maximum velocity Vmax as Vmax = m2 A2 (9)

Now the Reynolds number is calculated as ReD = 2 Vmax do 2 (10)

where 2 , 2 are the corresponding properties for shell side uid. So Nusselt number is now obtained using the Zhukzuskas corelation
0.36 N uD = C1 C2 (Rem ) D,max )(P r

Pr P rs

1/4

(11)

Valid when, NL 20 0.7 < P r < 500 8

1000 < ReD,max < 2 106 C1 and m are the constants obtained from the tables. C2 is the correction factor for considering only one tube row and its value for a staggered arrangement is 0.64. The heat transfer areas in both the shell side and the tube side are calculated. For the tube side the area is given by A1 = Nrow di LB (12)

On the shell side we are considering the arrangement to be similar to a bank of tubes, hence the area will be given by A2 = Nrow do LB (13)

4. The overall heat transfer coecient for the cell in cross ow is found out using 1 1 1 t + + (14) = UA h1 A1 h2 A2 kAm where t is the thickness of the tube, k is the thermal conductivity of the material of the heat exchanger. Am and t are given by Am = A2 A1 A2 ln A1 do di 2 (15)

t=

(16)

5. Find the NTU on the tube side for the cell. The NTU is given by N T U1 = UA (mc Cp )1 (17)

We have to note that while calculating the value of (mc Cp )1 , for the tube side the mass ow rate is a fraction of the total tube side mass ow rate. The mass ow rate through the cell is given by mc = m1 Nrow Ntot (18)

6. Find the temperature eectiveness of the cell using the following equations [3] K = 1 exp(N T U1 ) (19)

R1 =

mc Cp,1 m2 Cp,2

(20)

P1 = We also have P1 equal to

1 exp(KR1 ) R1

(21)

P1 =

T1,o T1,i T2,i T1,i

(22)

Among these now T1,o , the outlet temperature for the tube side uid, is the only unknown and can be found out . The second output temperature is found by energy balance for the cell mc Cp,1 (T1,o T1,i ) = m2 Cp,2 (T2,i T2,o ) (23)

7. The outlet temperatures of the rst cell being known, is now fed into the second cell and the entire solution procedure is repeated, for the successive cells, till we get the nal outlet temperatures of the heat exchanger.

5.2

Pressure Drop

The design of a heat exchanger in most cases involves a constraint on the pressure drop experienced by one or both the uids inside the heat exchanger. Hence, once the design is completed using the solution procedure outlined above, it is necessary to analyse whether the design conforms to the pressure drop requirement. In case the pressure drop requirements are not being met, then the design has to modied (by varying the physical parameters of the heat exchanger) so that the design constraints are satised. 5.2.1 Shell side pressure drop

The shell side pressure drop is given by [1] PS = 8jf DS de L LB u2 s 2 w

0.14

(24)

where, L is the length of the heat exchanger(here we approximate it to be the length of the tube), de is the shell side hydraulic diameter, us is the linear velocity, and w are the viscosity of the shell side uid at the uid bulk temperature and the wall temperature respectively. jf is the Colburn j-factor. The length of the heat exchanger is obtained from the product of the bae spacing and the number of baes. For a triangular pitch arrangement of tubes the shell side hydraulic diameter is given by

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de =

2 2 4(0.86PT 0.25Do ) Do

(25)

The linear velocity us is given by, us = Gs = As = Gs ms As

(PT do )Ds LB Pt

The colburn j-factor has to be obtained from tables, however, the plot is linear in log-log scale and an approximate linear equation for the plot can be found and be used for the calculation of pressure drop. The equations for the colburn j factor are log10 jf = 1.4 log10 Re Re 250 log10 jf = 0.166 log10 Re 0.6 5.2.2 Tube side pressure drop Re > 250 (26) (27)

The tube side pressure drop is given by [1] Pt = NP 8jf L di w

m

+ 2.5

u2 t 2

(28)

where NP is the number of tube side passes, ut is the velocity of the uid in the tube. The value of m is 0.25 for Re greater than 2100 and 0.14 for Re greater than 100. An additional term of 2.5 is added in the above equation to approximately accomodate for the unaccounted eects such as contraction at inlets and expansion at outlets. The colburn j-factor is obtained from the charts. However it is noted that the graph of the Colburn J factor is linear in the logarithmic scale and the equation for the lines can be found. So the equations for the j-factor are log10 jf = 1.025 log10 Re 0.925 log10 jf = 0.23 log10 Re 1.423 Re 900 Re > 900 (29) (30)

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5.3

Design Methodology

The design of a shell and tube heat exchangers depends on a number of parameters like shell diameter, bae spacing, tube diameter etc. The design requirement may ask us to come up with a design with specic constraints. In such a case , it is dicult to obtain a valid design at the rst step of the calculation itself as a lot of parameters have to be assumed. So an iterative method has to adopted , where in the heat exchanger parameters are varied within each iteration to satisfy all the constraints. The initial design is done with a relatively large diameter of shell,minimum number of tube passes and with the greatest bae spacing. With this condition, the criteria for the length constraint is evaluated. Then at the next stage, pressure drop conditions are checked, the initial design may satisfy just one constraint, or even may fail to satisfy any of the design requirement. In such a case the variation, as suggested by a owchart is made and the design is reevaluated considering the specications. This iteration will go on until, all the constraints are met and an optimum design condition has been formulated. The number of iterations will greatly depend on the skill of the person conducting this analysis. Assumption of values for quantities, that are far away from the design requirement will require a large number of iterations ,to achieve a satisfactory design. One of the methods of avoiding this issue is to use an approximate design method, so that an approximate value for the dierent parameters are known before hand and they can be used to evaluate the initial design, so that, the initial design itself, lies closer to the required design and the number of iterations required from there on will be much smaller. 5.3.1 Approximate sizing

The method specied above requires the number of baes present in the heat exchanger to be known. This in turn shall need the length of the heat exchanger to be guessed. The execution time of the algorithm will greatly depend on the accuracy of the guess. Thus, we conduct an approximate sizing of the heat exchanger based on Kerns method to calculate an approximate value of the number of baes. The heat transfer coecient on the shell side is given by the correlation, hs = 0.36 k De De GS
0.55

Cp k

0.33

0.14

(31)

wherede is the shell side hydraulic diameter as described by Eqn. (25) and GS is the shell side mass velocity obtained from mT GS = AS where mT is the total mass ow on the the shell side and AS is the cross-ow area measured along the centerline of ow. AS = DS (PT do )LB PT 12

The tube side heat transfer coecient is given by Nusselt number correlation as described in Eqn. (5). The overall heat transfer coecient is then calculated 1 1 t 1 = + + U( o)A( o) h( o)A( o) h( i)A( i) kA( m) The overall heat load for the heat exchanger is calculated as follows: Q( t) = mC( p)(T( o) T( i)) (33) (32)

for either side uid. This is also equal to the heat load calculated using the overall heat transfer Q( t) = U( o)AT( LM ) (34) Here, Area(A) is the entire area available for heat exchange A= d2 L 4 (35)

Thus, the length L can be calculated approximately by substituting a desired value of the temperature value To For a given bae spacing, the number of baes can thus be calculated and initial design can be made using that value. It is to be noted that the approximation is based on an approximate outlet temperature for the service uid which is a known desirable quantity in most cases.

References
[1] Sarit K. Das. Process Heat Transfer. Narosa Publishing House, 2005. [2] Frank P. Incropera and David P. DeWitt. Fundamentals of Heat and Mass Transfer. Wiley-India, 2006. [3] R. K. Shah and Duan P. Sekuli. Fundamentals of Heat Exchanger Design. s c John-Wiley and Sons. [4] D. Brian Spalding and J. Taborek. Heat Exchanger Design Handbook. Hemisphere Publishing Corporation.

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