Heat Transfer Characteristics of Flat Plate Finned-Tube Heat Exchangers with a Variation of Fin Pitch and Number of Tube Row

The objective of this study is to investigate the heat transfer performance of flat plate finned-tube heat exchangers with large fin pitch. In this study, twenty-two heat exchangers were tested with a variation of fin pitch, number of tube row, and tube alignment. The heat transfer coefficient decreased with a reduction of the fin pitch and an increase of the number of tube row. The staggered tube alignment improved heat transfer performance more than compared to the inline tube alignment. A heat transfer correlation was developed from the measured data for flat plate finned-tubes with large fin pitch. The correlation yielded good predictions of the measured data with mean deviations of for the inline and staggered tube alignment, respectively.