Numerical Comparison of Thermohydraulic Performance and Fluid-Induced Vibrations for STHXs with Segmental, Helical, and Novel Clamping Antivibration Baffles

Abstract

The most extensively used heat exchanger in numerous research fields and industrial processes is the shell and tube heat exchanger. The selection of the baffle plays a vital role to regulate and increase the thermohydraulic performance and also to decrease fluid-induced vibrations due to shell side flow. 3-D computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and fluid-structure interaction (FSI) have been done to analyze the pressure drop, heat transfer coefficient, vortex shedding, and tube deformation due to induced vibrations among the recently developed clamping antivibration baffles with square twisted tubes, helical baffles with cylindrical tubes, and conventional segmental baffles with cylindrical tubes at different shell side flow rates by using commercial software ANSYS. Complete heat exchangers are modeled for numerical comparison; the thermohydraulic performance of the numerical model shows the suitable agreement by validating it with already published results and Esso method for single segmental baffles. It is then used to compare the performance of the same heat exchangers with CBSTT and HBCT. Thermohydraulic performance of CBSTT-STHX is better than SGCT-STHX. The heat transfer coefficient of heat exchangers with tube-to-baffle-hole clearance is higher and there is a reduction in the pressure drop compared to the results of STHXs without tube-to-baffle-hole clearance. The deformation in the tubes and vortex-induced vibrations are minimum in STHX with CBSTT than in STHXs with HBCT and SGCT.