Study regarding the Effects of Wire Mesh Inserts in a Shell-and-Tube Heat Exchanger using Computational Fluid Dynamics Technique

Heat exchangers find widespread use for domestic purposes, industries, automobiles, aviation and many more applications. There is a pressing priority to maximize the efficiency of heat exchangers and also to considerably have a compact design of heat exchanger. One of the methods to achieve this is by introducing wire mesh inserts into the heat exchanger. Wire mesh inserts not only meets the objective of heat transfer enhancement but also cause a drop in fluid pressure. In the present study, a novel model of a shell and tube heat exchanger (STHX) was designed and computational mesh was generated using ANSYS Fluent, an advanced meshing software. The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technique was carried out in a STHX by using wire mesh inserts and without using wire mesh inserts to analyze the temperature and velocity distribution along the shell and tube. It was inferred that the heat transfer was found to be higher in the heat exchanger having wire mesh inserts inside the tubes. Furthermore, analysis was also conducted by varying the Reynolds number and also by using liquids of different density. The results obtained showed that the heat exchanger is more effective when the fluid was less viscous. Following the CFD simulation, proper Reynolds number trends for various wire inserts with J factor and Nusselt number under the laminar flow was also conducted.