AC-14 Longitudinal Pitch Effect on Pressure Drop and Heat Transfer in High-Finned Tubes

K. J. Farrell

2005

When increasing longitudinal pitch, methods for both pressure drop and heat transfer predictions for inline and staggered high-finned tube bundles are evaluated. When we compare the behavior simulated through computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to results from Xace and ESCOA for a characteristic tube geometry, the CFD results show that the effect of both tube layout and tube longitudinal pitch diminishes with increased longitudinal spacing. We developed functions to improve the predictions and represent the expected asymptotic behavior when the longitudinal spacing between rows is beyond the range of the test data.