CFD Analysis of a vertical tube having internal fins for the Natural Convection

Deorah, Shashank (2012) CFD Analysis of a vertical tube having internal fins for
the Natural Convection. BTech thesis.

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Abstract

The heat transfer rate to a fluid flowing in pipe can be enhanced by the use of internal fins. This thesis concerned with computer simulation study of vertical tube with helical fins used to enhance their heat transfer performance subjected to natural convection heat transfer. All the main parameters which can significantly influence the heat transfer performance of finned tube has been analyzed. Natural convection in a vertical tube without fins was taken as the reference tube and different fin patterns such as a single fin with large no. of turns like coiled shape and large no. of fins with single turn is compared with reference tube on the basis of different parameters such as heat transfer rate, surface nusselt number, heat transfer coefficient, fin effectiveness etc. There are some dimensionless numbers which affect the natural convection such as nusselt number which is the function of Reynolds number, grashof number and prandlt number, Rayleigh number which is the product of grashoff and prandtl number. After getting best fin configuration compared it with different fin profile such as rectangular cross section,tapered fin with trapezoidal cross section and hyperbolic cross section. All the computer simulation has been done on the ANSYS 13.0 . The Navier-stokes equations were used to solve for the fluid flow inside the tube and the Boussinesq approximation was used to get the buoyancy effect. Aluminium is used for the fin material and air is taken as the fluid flowing inside the tube and the flow is taken as laminar. It was found that the large number of fins with single turn is more efficient then other fin patterns, as there is less flow resistance, high heat transfer rate.

Item Type:	Thesis (BTech)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	CFD, Natural Convection, Vertical tube, Helical fins
Subjects:	Engineering and Technology > Mechanical Engineering > Computational Fluid Dynamics
Divisions:	Engineering and Technology > Department of Mechanical Engineering
ID Code:	3330
Deposited By:	Deorah Shashank
Deposited On:	21 May 2012 16:08
Last Modified:	21 May 2012 16:08
Supervisor(s):	Satapathy, A K