The influence of baffle structure on shell side fluid flow and heat transfer for shell-and-tube heat exchanger

Velocity fields,flow resistance and heat transfer in shell side of shell-and-tube heat exchanger with the segmental baffles and the continuous helical baffle were simulated using Fluent software.An experiment was performed to validate the calculated results.The results show that there are obvious stagnation region in the segmental-baffle heat exchanger and uniform velocity fields in continuous-helical-baffle heat exchanger.At the same flow rate,the pressure drop in the continuous-helical-baffle heat exchanger is about 32% of that of segmental-baffle heat exchanger,but the heat transfer rate is slightly lower.The heat transfer coefficient of continuous-helical-baffle heat exchanger under the identical pressure drop is larger than that of segmental-baffle heat exchanger,about 1.3 times.The calculated values are well agreed with experimental results.This implies that the mathematical models used in this paper are reasonable and the actual condition of heat exchanger is well simulated.