A Simplified Approach for Calculating Heat Transfer Coefficients for Fluid Guiding Elements with Alternating Redirections of Flow

Abstract

Fluid guiding elements (FGEs), additive manufactured inserts that enhance heat transfer, have shown the potential to reduce the size of pipe-in-pipe heat exchangers up to a factor of 20. Due to their unique design, the calculation of the geometrical parameters for a specific application remains challenging and was initially solved by computationally expensive computational fluid dynamics simulations. This work presents a simplified approach, which treats the fluid and the FGE as pseudo-homogeneous to enable the fast calculation of effective heat transfer coefficients. The approach is developed based on water in laminar flow state and subsequently tested with different fluids.