Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation of flow in heat exchanger

Abstract

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is a useful tool in solving and analysing problems that involve fluid flows. Meanwhile, shell and tube heat exchanger is the most common type of heat exchanger and widely use in oil refinery and other large chemical processes because it suite to be applied for high pressure process. This software can be applied in the industries where it can save the cost and time from doing the experimental method. This paper presents the simulation of heat transfer in shell and tube heat exchanger model and validation to heat transfer in Heat Exchanger Process Control Training System (Model WT 922) that been used in UniMAP’s bioprocess engineering laboratory. CFD ANSYS Fluent 15.0 package was the type of package that was used for this simulation process. This research were involved several steps to solved this simulation process which are create geometry model of shell and tube heat exchanger. Then, it will proceed with meshing process where the model will be divided with three different size of mesh whish are coarse, medium and fine in order to identify the type of size mesh that are suitable for this simulation. An experiment was carried out at different mass flow rate which are at 0.392 kg/s, 0.41 kg/s, 0.4138 kg/s, 0.419 kg/s and 0.422 kg/s. This is the boundary condition for mass flow rate at the inlet of pipe in this process. A model with the medium size of mesh with 13.51% error was chosen as the type of mesh that will be used to further this study. It was chosen because it has the shorten time than a model with fine mesh to converged. Other than that, the result obtained from this model was more effective than the model with coarse size of mesh.