Study of Shell and Tube Heat Exchanger Design using Computational Fluid (CFD) Method

The shell and tube heat exchanger is the most common type heat exchanger widely used in the oil refinery and other large chemical processes because it suits a high-pressure application. The process of solving shell and tube heat exchanger in simulation consists of modeling and meshing the basic geometry using CFD package ANSYS 15.0. The objective of this simulation is to design of shell and tube heat exchanger with helical baffle and study the flow and temperature field inside the shell using ANSYS software tools. The heat exchanger consists of 10 tubes with the 800 mm shell length & the 100 mm in diameter. The helix angle of helical baffle will be varied from 0 degree to 25 degree. In this simulation, due to different helix angle and flow rate, the pressure varies in shell throughout. The flow pattern in the shell side of the heat exchanger with continuous helical baffles was forced to be rotational and helical due to the geometry of the continuous helical baffles, which results in an expressively increase the heat transfer coefficient per unit pressure drop in the heat exchanger.