Investigations of water-cooled tubes with protrusions for flow and heat transfer characteristics

This study aims to present a numerical study on the flow and heat transfer performance of a water-cooled tube with protrusions in different geometrical parameters.

A new type of enhanced heat exchanger tube is designed. Protrusions are formed on the inner surface of the tube by mechanical expansion, compression and other processing methods. A three-dimensional numerical symmetry model is established by ANSYS for studying the influence of protrusion distance, protrusion radius and protrusion arrangement on flow and heat transfer characteristics in turbulent flow.

The results show that the protrusions increase the heat transfer area and improve the heat transfer effect but also increase the flow resistance. Performance evaluation criteria (PEC) is applied to evaluate the flow and heat transfer characteristics of convex tubes. When adopting the aligned protrusions arrangement, the radius of 2 mm and distance of twice the protrusion radius is most heat transfer effect. The PEC of protrusion tubes with a staggered arrangement are higher than those in aligned arrangement, and the maximum value is 2.36 when Reynolds number is 12,000.

At present, most of the protrusion technology applications are based on the cold plate heat dissipation of electronic devices, and the flow path is rectangular. Convex tube heat exchanger is a high-efficiency heat exchanger, which uses convex tubes instead of smooth tubes in tubular heat exchangers to enhance heat transfer and widely used in petroleum, chemical, textile, oil refining and other industries.