A numerical study of flow and thermal fields in finned tube heat exchangers (Effect of the tube diameter)
- Daikin Industries, Ltd., Sakai, Osaka (Japan). Mechanical Engineering Lab.
Enhancement of air-side heat transfer in heat exchangers used in air-conditioning machines can be considered as a way to solve the problem caused by use of alternative refrigerants. Related with this, the present study aims to investigate the flow and thermal fields in finned tube heat exchangers. In previous papers (Torikoshi et al., 1994 and Xi et al., 1994, 1995), numerical schemes that used a compound grid system for finned tube heat exchangers were described. The schemes were validated with experimental data. In the present paper, a three-dimensional unsteady numerical computation for a model of a two-row finned tube heat exchanger located in a uniform flow field has been performed to see the effect of tube diameter on the flow and thermal fields. Several features were found in the study. One interesting finding was that increasing the tube diameter almost does not improve heat transfer performance but increases the resistance of the fluid flow inside the heat exchanger.
- OSTI ID:
- 458436
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-951135--; ISBN 0-7918-1751-2
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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