Tapered Twisted Tape Inserts for Enhanced Heat Transfer

Insertion of twisted tapes in smooth channels is one of the passive methods used for enhancing heat transfer. Flow and associated heat transfer characteristics of these channels are very complex. Understanding this complex flow is helpful while designing new passive methods. Numerical methods like computational fluid dynamics (CFD) are gaining much popularity for analyzing and designing these heat transfer enhancement techniques. This paper focuses on such a numerical study. The preliminary study is focused on development of numerical methodology through validation. Successive studies are aimed at development of an innovative design for twisted tape. Twisted tapes with taper angle (tapered twisted tapes, i.e., tape width decreases along the flow direction) are developed and evaluated on the basis of the performance of these tapes with those of conventional tapes. A circular tube with tapered twisted tape with a twist ratio of 3 and taper angles of 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, and 0.7 is considered for this study along with a plain tube. Three Reynolds numbers (Re) of 8545, 11393, and 13333 are considered to examine the sensitivity of the performance. Simulations are performed with a commercially available CFD tool, ANSYS FLUENT (v14.0). Heat transfer and pressure drop results are presented in the form of Nusselt number (Nu), friction factor (f), and overall enhancement ratio (eta). An increase of 17% in overall enhancement is predicted with taper angle of 0.5.