An innovative cost-effective numerical-analytical procedure to derive heat correlations for shell and tube heat exchangers equipped with smooth and dimple tubes

Nowadays, heat-exchangers in general and shell-and-tube heat-exchangers (STHEs) in particular have crucial influences on the performances of various industry processes. Apparently, the STHE designers wish to design STHEs with optimal performances under various operating conditions. Literature shows that previous research works relied entirely on either experiments or numerical simulations to calculate the hydrothermal performances of STHEs. Alternatively, this study introduces an innovative efficient procedure, which benefits from both numerical simulations and analytical approaches to accurately predict the STHE thermal performance at its wide ranges of proposed working conditions. This procedure involves three main steps. First, numerical simulations are utilized to develop accurate numerical-based correlations for both smooth and dimpled tubes for 3,000 < Re < 30,000 and 7 < Pr < 70 ranges. Second, the P-NTU analytical approach is used to construct a full STHE model based on its specific geometrical characteristics. Third, the developed correlations are suitably inserted in the P-NTU model to produce correlation for the entire STHE and calculate its thermal performance under various operating conditions. It is shown that the achieved results are as accurate as the experimental data. As the novelty, this study eliminates the need for expensive experimental setups and reduces the computational costs due to benefiting from analytical correlations. Since the present procedure is cost-effective, the designers are encouraged to design STHEs with more optimum thermal performances within their working condition ranges via suitable choices of various their design parameters, such as the tube type and size and the STHE general configuration. Fortunately, the present procedure can be similarly extended to design and optimize the thermal performances of other similar thermal equipment.