Thermal performance of one-pass shell-and-tube heat exchangers in counter-flow

Abstract

[Abstract] A computational methodology is proposed and applied to calculate the temperature effectiveness, P, and the logarithmic mean temperature difference (LMTD) correction factor, F, of TEMA E shell-and-tube heat exchangers with one-pass and fluids flowing in counter-flow. An arbitrary number of baffles is considered along with three different mixture conditions of the shell-side fluid. The methodology is based on various modeling considerations adopted in several publications addressing crossflow and shell-and-tube heat exchangers. Each section between two baffles is idealized as a crossflow heat exchanger with different shell-side mixing conditions. The obtained results are compared to available solutions from the literature, showing a very good agreement. New closed-form mathematical P relations and approximate F correlations depending on the number of baffles, very appropriate for preliminary computerized analysis and design procedures, are provided. A theoretical study about the influence of the number of baffles and two shell-side fluid mixing hypotheses over P and F values is presented. The proposed methodology could be used to obtain P and F values for a particular arrangement of 1-1 shell-and-tube heat exchanger.