Performance Analysis of a Shell and Tube Heat Exchanger with Helical Baffle in ANSYS

The present study is on three-dimensional numerical simulation of a shell-and-tube heat exchangers (STHXs) with continuous helical baffle (STHXsHB) is carried out and is performed based on the simulation results. The STHXs contain 25 tubes inside a 500 mm long and 200 mm diameter shell and mass flow rate of shell-side fluid is varied from .3 kg/s to .4 kg/s. At first, physical and mathematical models are developed and numerically simulated using finite element method (FEM). For the validation of the computational model, shell-side average Nusselt number (Nu) is calculated from the simulation results and compared with the available experimental results. The comparative study shows that STHXsHB has 72-127% higher heat transfer coefficient per unit pressure drop compared to the conventional STHXsSB for the same shell-side mass flow rate. Moreover, STHXsHB has 59-63% lower shell-side pressure drop than STHXsSB