A Numerical Study of the Thermal Performance of Two Stationary Insert Designs in Internal Compressible Flows

Enhancement of the natural and forced convection heat transfer has been the subject of numerous academic and industrial studies. Air blenders, mechanical agitators, and static mixers have been developed to increase the forced convection heat transfer rate in compressible and incompressible flows. Stationary inserts can be efficiently employed as heat transfer enhancement devices in the natural convection systems. Generally, a stationary heat transfer enhancement insert consists of a number of equal motionless segments, placed inside of a pipe in order to control flowing fluid streams. These devices have low maintenance and operating costs, low space requirements and no moving parts. A range of designs exists for a wide range of specific applications. The shape of the elements determines the character of the fluid motion and thus determines thermal effectiveness of the insert. There are several key parameters that may be considered in the design procedure of a heat transfer enhancement insert, which lead to significant differences in the performance of various designs. An ideal insert, for natural conventional heat transfer in compressible flow applications, provides a higher rate of heat transfer and a thermally homogenous fluid with minimized pressure drop and required space. To choose an insert for a given application or in order to design a new insert, besides experimentation, it is possible to use Computational Fluid Dynamics to study the insert performance. This paper presents the outcomes of the numerical studies on industrial stationary heat transfer enhancement inserts and illustrates how a heat transfer enhancement insert can improve the heat transfer in buoyancy driven compressible flows. Using different measuring tools, thermal performance of two different inserts (twisted and helix) are studied. It is shown that the helix design leads to a higher rate of heat transfer, while causes a lower pressure drop in the flowfield, suggesting the insert effectiveness is higher for the helix design, compared to a twisted plate.