Plate Fin-And-Tube Heat Exchanger Computational Fluid Dynamics Model

Insight into thermal-hydraulic correlations of plate fin-and-tube heat exchangers is of great interest in many industrial applications. Numerical simulations allow to efficiently and accurately obtain air-side heat transfer and pressure drop correlations for a broad variety of heat exchanger configurations, provided the numerical method is soundly validated against experimental measurements. In this contribution, we present a thoroughly validated computational fluid dynamics model applicable to solution of the conjugate heat-transfer problem in plate fin-and-tube heat exchangers. Favorable agreement with experimental work on four different geometries is demonstrated for high Reynolds numbers. Three out of four comparisons agree to within 20% with experiments. The computational model is applied to study the dependence of heat transfer and pressure drop in relation to the transverse tube array pitch. We show that minimizing the array angle results in enhanced fin efficiency.