Numerical study of the thermal and hydraulic characteristics of a round tube heat exchanger with louvered fins and delta winglets

Abstract

Paper presented at the 8th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Mauritius, 11-13 July, 2011.

Louvered fin and round tube heat exchangers are widely used in air conditioning devices and heat pumps. In this study the effect of punching delta winglet vortex generators into the louvered fin surface in the near wake region of each tube was investigated. Numerical simulations were performed on the compound design and the thermal and hydraulic characteristics were evaluated. It was found that the delta winglets can significantly reduce the size of the wake regions. This results in an enhanced heat transfer. Further, it was shown that the vortices do not propagate far downstream. Due to the flow deflection they are destroyed in the downstream louver bank. For the configuration studied, the pressure drop penalty of adding vortex generators was also significant, indicating that an optimization is necessary to select a compound design with improved overall performance.