Analysis of heat transfer and pressure drop for fin-and-tube heat exchangers with rectangular winglet-type vortex generators

In present work, heat transfer enhancement and pressure loss penalty for fin-and-tube heat exchangers with rectangular winglet pairs (RWPs) were numerically investigated in a relatively low Reynolds number flow. The purpose of this study was to explore the fundamental mechanism between the local flow structure and the heat transfer augmentation. The RWPs were placed with a special orientation for the purpose of enhancement of heat transfer. The numerical study involved three-dimensional flow and conjugate heat transfer in the computational domain, which was set up to model the entire flow channel in the air flow direction. The effects of attack angle of RWPs, row-number of RWPs and placement of RWPs on the heat transfer characteristics and flow structure were examined in detail. It was observed that the longitudinal vortices caused by RWPs and the impingement of RWPs-directed flow on the downstream tube were important reasons of heat transfer enhancement for fin-and-tube heat exchangers with RWPs. It was interesting to find that the pressure loss penalty of the fin-and-tube heat exchangers with RWPs can be reduced by altering the placement of the same number of RWPs from inline array to staggered array without reducing the heat transfer enhancement. The results showed that the rectangular winglet pairs (RWPs) can significantly improve the heat transfer performance of the fin-and-tube heat exchangers with a moderate pressure loss penalty.