CFD Analysis of Heat Transfer Enhancement for Twisted Tape Inserted in Spirally Corrugated Tubes and Proposal of a New Vane-Inserted Geometry

This research investigates the enhancement of heat transfer in a heat exchanger that is made of a corrugated tube which has a twisted plate inserted in it; the corrugation and twisted plate are expected to increase the amount of heat transfer since the plate is acting as a connection between the center of the flow and the edges of the tube. The turbulence will cause an increase in pressure drop along the channel length, so the investigation will try to find the best compromise between the gain in heat transfer and loss of hydraulic energy by using well-established metrics. A positive heat transfer gain is achieved if the metric indicates a value equal to or greater than 1. This CFD research will be compared with the experimental results found in previous studies cited in the text. After validating the CFD results, it is proposed to investigate a new insert geometry to further improve the efficiency of the heat exchanger. The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation was conducted to investigate and validate the CFD model, which evaluates the heat transfer performance in a spirally corrugated tube that has a twisted tape inserted. The heat transfer was then compared to a simple corrugated tube without the twisted tape and to a smooth tube with no corrugations and no twisted tape.