AFM 237 Computational design of tubular heat exchanges

Completed

Energy Efficiency(Industry)

Applied Research and Development

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY (Mechanical, Aeronautical and Manufacturing Engineering)

Not Cross-cutting

Mr G Tucker
Campden and Chorleywood Food Research Association

Standard

DEFRA

01 January 2005

31 December 2005

12 months

£58,000

No relevance to Underpinning Sectors

London

DEFRA Resource Efficient and Resilient Food Chain

Mr G Tucker, Campden and Chorleywood Food Research Association

Project Contact, Campbell Group Products Ltd
Project Contact, ANSYS Europe Limited
Project Contact, Centura Foods Ltd
Project Contact, Consumer Healthcare, GlaxoSmithKline
Project Contact, Tetra Pak Processing UK
Project Contact, H J Heinz Company Ltd
Project Contact, University of Plymouth

To apply CFD techniques to assist in selecting the most commercially viable design improvements to multi-tube tubular heat exchangers. This is intended to speed up the transition between the design concepts that are discussed as ideas and the much smaller number of prototypes that need to be built to test the ideas.

The work proposed herein is intended to build on the findings from the AFM 126 LINK project on innovations in heat recovery systems for tubular heat exchangers. AFM 126 has applied CFD to the prediction of heat transfer and fluid flow within the complex geometries that comprise multi-tube heat exchangers when operating in heat recovery mode only. One of the critical components of this project was validation of the CFD predictions for shell-side flows using experimentally measured pressures, wall shear rates, temperatures and flow visualization. This stage has been completed successfully and the CFD simulations have since been applied to geometries of ever increasing complexity, including some of novel design. Turbulent shell-side, and laminar or turbulent tube-side, flow and heat transfer will be considered. Commercial considerations dictate that any modifications to heat exchanger equipment should ideally result in enhanced performance in both conventional and regenerative modes of operation.

17/11/11