DefinePK

Abstract

Heat exchanger is an important device in all thermal systems. It is widely used equipment in numerous industries such as process control, petroleum refining, chemical industry, heat recovery systems and much more. Energy and material saving considerations as well as environmental challenges in the industry nowadays have stimulated the demand for high efficiency of the heat exchanger. To improve the efficiency of the heat exchanger, heat transfer performance enhancement in the heat exchanger must be considered. This study is carried out to investigate and examine the fluid flow in a straight pipe heat exchanger with thermal designing and analysed by using Solid Works software. Three different materials of the heat exchanger are used which are copper, stainless steel and brass to identify the best material of a straight pipe heat exchanger. The heat exchanger is set to be oil-water heat exchanger model. The fluid flow properties in the pipe of heat exchanger are simulated with computerized simulation to recognize the best material of heat exchanger. There are two parameters that take into consideration in this study which are temperature and pressure distributions. Through the simulation results, copper shows the most efficient heat transfer compared to stainless steel and brass. This implies that, copper is the most efficient heat conducting and it can be concluded that the effects of different material and fluid flow in the pipe and in the cylinder of a straight pipe heat exchanger do enhance the performance of the heat exchanger. The analysis of the findings of this study is presented in this paper.