Study on the performance of a novel sinusoidal staggered shell and tube heat exchanger without baffle with experiment verification and CFD modeling

A sinusoidal staggered shell and tube heat exchanger without baffle (SS-STHX) is proposed to avoid the drawbacks of traditional STHX, such as fouling resistance, dead zones and high pressure drop. The column of SS-STHX tubes are arranged in the same direction, while adjacent tubes are in the opposite direction. The performance of SS-STHX has been studied through experiment and numerical simulation. First, a full-scale experiment was conducted to test and verify the simulation method. Empirical formulation was also used to calculate the pressure drop. Then, the effects of structure size and installation spacing on the performance of the heat exchanger were discussed in detail. The ratio of convective heat transfer coefficient (h) and pressure drop (Δp) was used to evaluate the comprehensive performance of SS-STHX. The results show that the performance of the SS-STHX can be improved with the increment of the sinusoidal tube amplitude and the tube number per column, but it is not indefinitely. The heat exchanger's comprehensive performance can also be enhanced with the increment of the sinusoidal tube frequency, the tube spacing, and the arrangement of tubes in the cross-row pattern. The SS-STHX is suitable for a wide range of engineering applications due to its high heat transfer and low pressure drop.