The aim of the present work is to carry out the checking of the tube bundle of heat exchanger for the occurrence of tube-tube collision caused by cross-flow vibration with and without the use of impingement plate. This will be achieved using numerical 2D CFD (computational fluid dynamics) analysis. The 2D analysis is done using ANSYS Fluent software. Tube movement in the shell side is provided by UDF (user-defined function) DEFINE_SDOF_PROPERTIES. By determining the stiffness and weight of the tubes, two-way fluid and tube interaction can be achieved. Due to limitations of 2D CFD analysis, only the occurrence of the tube-tube or tube-shell collisions can be observed. Unfortunately, the first collision causes termination of the simulation due to negative volumes in dynamic mesh. Possible solutions to the issue are also discussed in presented paper.
The analyzed geometry of the shell side is taken from the Heat Exchanger Tube Vibration Data Bank [2]. This publication collects heat exchanger data for which vibration phenomena have been reported. The above-mentioned geometry is a domain with tube bundle at the shell side under the inlet. In the same domain, both the tie rod and the seal strips and the 45° turn of the partitions are considered.
