Cfd Analysis and Comparison of Vertical Ribbed Tube with Smooth Tube

Computational Fluid Dynamics(CFD) simulation of heat transfer and fluid flow analysis in the turbulent flow regime in a spirally ribbed tube and a smooth tube in vertical orientation are simulated in this project using ANSYS Fluent. The ribbed tube has outside diameter of 25mm, maximum inner diameter of 18.80mm, minimum inner diameter of 17.50mm and pitch varied from 2m to 0.25m.The smooth tube has outside diameter of 26.7mm and inner diameter of 18.88mm andhelix angle of60o. Both tubes were uniformly heated by passing an electrical current along the tube with a heated length of 1m. CFD meshing is carried out using ANSYS Meshing Platform.The CFD simulation is performed on a vertical orientation of the steel tubes (rifled and smooth) under six different inlet velocities of 0.893m/s, 1.786m/s, 2.38m/s, 2.976m/s,3.57m/s and 4.166m/s. The main objective of this thesis is to determine the heat transfer and pressure drop in both vertical smooth and ribbed tubes. The fluid used is water and the initial temperature is 25oC. The heat flux that for heating the tube is equal to 150KW/m2