Three-dimensional numerical simulation of shell-and-tube heat exchangers. Part II: Heat transfer

A three-dimensional, colocated, fully implicit control volume based calculation procedure MEATY [1] has been developed over the past 3 years to simulate flow and heat transfer in shell-and-tube heat exchangers. The three-dimensional model uses the distributed resistance concept of Patankar and Spalding [2], in conjunction with surface permeabilities and volumetric porosities to model the tubes in the heat exchanger. Part I of this article describes the details of the distributed resistance formulation, leakage modeling, geometry modeling, and the turbulence model. Details of the shell-side and tube-side heat transfer are given in this second part. The tube-side temperature field is computed by solving an enthalpy equation for the tube-side fluid. Coupling between the shell-sine and the tube-side equations is described, and numerical results are compared with the Delaware project experimental data. We have made use of the symmetry of the heat exchanger to speed up our calculations. Good agreement was obtained between our three-dimensional numerical simulations and experimental results for overall pressure drop and temperature differences. Computed overall pressure drops and temperature differences were within 15% of experimental results.