Research Article Open Access

Design and Analysis of a Double Spiral Counter Flow Heat Exchanger Using CFD

Abstract

Spiral flow heat exchangers are known as excellent heat exchanger because of far compact and high heat transfer efficiency. SFHE is a unique design where it consists of single fluid as working fluid for heat exchange. Here heat transfer takes place between solid and fluid, and hence can be called as conjugate heat transfer. Heat transfer characteristics of SFHE are observed at various Reynolds number and base temperature. SFHE is designed and fabricated with new arrangement for measuring the heat transfer is employed for obtaining the experimental results. The concept of thermoelectric effect is used which is direct conversion of temperature difference to electric voltage, to measure temperature at various points in the heat exchanger. CAD model is developed and computations are performed using commercially available CFD package ANSYS-CFX for the same boundary conditions, input conditions as that considered for experimental purpose. Obtained CFD results are compared with that of experimental results for validation. It is observed that there is a good agreement between experimental and computational results. Optimization of the heat exchanger can be carried out using computational methods developed in this work for better performance.

Kulkarni Pavan Venkatesh, Prabhanjan Mishra, Krishna Kumar , Ajay Krishna T M, Sreenivas H T

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