INFLUENCE OF THE ENHANCED TUBES FOR STEAM CONDENSATION ON HORIZONTAL TUBE BUNDLE IN THE ABSORPTION CHILLER

Abstract

This work presents the numerically analyses for condensation of steam outside the horizontal tube bundle in the absorption chiller. The objective of this paper was to numerically compare the effect of three different types of horizontal tube bundle on different heat transfer parameters of absorption chiller. For this purpose, three types of tubes including simple tube, tube with external fin, and tube with internal groove were analyzed. Two-equation turbulence models have been used to simulate the flow field and heat transfer and the finite volume method was applied for numerical analyses using CFX software. The results showed that adding the external fin or inner groove to the tube, increased the heat transfer coefficient of tube bundle in absorption chiller. Due to the increase of heat transfer in condenser equipped with finned and grooved tubes, it was shown that the rate of steam condensation in these heat exchangers would be higher. The percentage of outlet condensate in the condenser with finned and grooved tubes were about 4.8 times of the heat exchanger with a simple tube. In conclusion, the overall findings indicated the increased performance of the condenser for the horizontal oriented tube bundles with external fin and internal groove. This work is a numerical part of a comprehensive research and its experimental part will be presented in the future work.

Keywords

• Heat Exchanger
• Horizontally Oriented Condensers
• Computational Fluid Dynamics
• Simple Tube
• Tube with External Fin
• Tube with Internal Groove.

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