Numerical analysis of The Tube Bank pressure drop of a Shell and tube heat exchanger using flat face header

Pressure drop is the main parameters describing the efficiency and acceptance of a particular shell and tube heat exchanger in any application. Pressure drop across the tube side is inversely proportional to the viz. Higher the pressure drop lower is the heat transfer and hence the required pumping power is high and correspondingly higher is the expense. The pressure drop on the tube side can be trichotomized as pressure drop due to Inlet nozzle, pressure drop in the tube bank, and pressure drop in the outlet nozzle. This report provides an insight into the research done on the analysis of the pressure drop in the tubes of a shell and tube heat exchanger. Although a remarkable contribution has been done through analytical relations governing the pressure drop and the numerical analysis of the pressure drop on the shell side of a shell and tube heat exchanger, cogent contribution can be made numerically on the tube side. The approach provided enables us to study detailed flow behavior (pressure drop) in the tubes using the TEMA BEM viz. a Flat Head Single Pass SHTX numerically viz. the use of computation for the mentioned research. Hence to achieve the task numerically the use of ANSYS16.0has been made assuming that the flow is steady and isothermal. Two different pressure zones have been identified viz. (1) High pressure drop zone (2) Low pressure drop zone across the tube banks. It was observed that nearly fifty percent of the tubes lie under each category. The pressure drop has been computed numerically at a specific inlet velocity and then correlated at different inlet velocities for a parametric study.