Experimental and CFD Analysis of Enhancement of Heat Transfer in a Horizontal Circular Tube Using Mesh Inserts in Turbulent Region

ABSTRACT

The present work focuses on experimental investigations of the augmentation of turbulent flow heat transfer in a horizontal tube by means of mesh inserts with air as the working fluid. Sixteen types of mesh inserts with screen diameters of 22mm, 18mm, 14mm and 10mm for varying distance between the screens of 50mm, 100mm, 150mm and 200mm in the porosity range of 99.73 to 99.98 are considered for experimentation. The Reynolds number varied from 7000 to 14000. It is observed that the Nusselt number almost doubled by using mesh inserts when compared to plain tube at the same mass flow rate. CFD techniques were also employed to perform optimization analysis of the mesh inserts. The horizontal tube along with mesh inserts was modeled in Gambit 2.2.30 with fine meshing and analyzed using FLUENT 6.2.16. CFD analysis was performed initially for plain tube and the results are compared with experimental values for validation.

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