Heat Transfer Enhancement and Pressure Drop Performance for Fin and Tube Compact Heat Exchangers with Radiantly Arranged Rectangular Winglet-Type Vortex Generators

In this paper, heat transfer enhancement has been numerically investigated for fin and tube compact heat exchangers with radiantly arranged rectangular winglets and has been compared with the existing structures. In the proposed structure, there are total 12 winglets, 3 on each tube arranged radiantly with an attack angle of 60° each. Investigation has been carried out on low Reynolds number from 400-800 heat transfer is compared with other structures without winglet as baseline arrangement, prevailing rectangular winglet arrangement and wavy down rectangular winglet arrangement. The simulation results show that the radiantly arranged winglet that guides the fluid from main flow to the wall creates collision and leads to turbulence behind the tube. It is found that newly proposed structure with radiantly arranged winglets has the highest heat transfer rate, as compared to the existing structures and this can replace the previous structures. The heat transfer characteristics and flow structures are numerically investigated in ANSYS.