Modeling and Analysis of Flower Baffle Plate in Shell and Tube Heat Exchanger Using CFD

Abstract

Especially in many industries like food industry, oil industry they used shell and tube heat exchangers in boiler. In heat exchangers baffle plates plays a major role to hold tubes in position preventing sagging, both in production and operation. That reduces the vibration in long tubes during transmission of fluids. Mostly shell and tube heat exchanger segmental baffle plates are used in industries. The main drawbacks of segmental baffle plate are high pressure drop during heat transfer. Material wastages are also high. Due to the high reverse flow so corrosion occur in existing baffle plate used in the shell and tube heat exchanger. To avoid these drawbacks we have modified the existing baffle plate design. Design and analysis of the flower baffle plate we have been done using softwares. For modeling the heat exchanger we have used solid works to create the 2D model, 3D model parts and assembly. And for the analysis Computational Fluid Dynamics is used to calculate the Temperature, Pressure drop and vorticity. Analysis is done for both the segmental baffle plate and flower baffle plate for the best comparison of results. Thus result indicated that the reduce pressure drop and increase in heat transfer co-efficient is quite successful and there is also reduction in material wastages and increases the life of heat exchanger.

Keywords: Boundary conditions, Computational fluid dynamics, Heat exchangers, Shell and tube.

View PDF