Performance screening of a louvered fin and vortex generator combination

Abstract

Paper presented to the 10th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Florida, 14-16 July 2014.

Heat exchangers for air conditioning applications are often of the fin and tube type. By choosing special fin geometries, the thermal performance of the heat exchanger can be enhanced. One of the recently proposed fin geometries for round tubes is the combination of louvers with a delta winglet vortex generator (VG). Several parameters impact the performance of this design, such as the louver angle and the angle of attack of the vortex generator. The fin geometry can be optimized by performing numerical simulations for different values of these parameters. In this work steady state computational fluid dynamics simulations are performed for a fixed inlet frontal velocity. Many authors use design of experiments techniques to evaluate the performance with a small amount of simulations. However, this often results in the assumption that many interaction effects between the parameters are negligible. In this work, a full factorial analysis has been done which is able to resolve all interactions between all parameters. It is shown that there are important interactions between the height of the VG, the aspect ratio of the VG and the louver angle. Taking these interactions into account, the optimal values of the parameters are determined with the objective of maximizing the heat transfer coefficient.