Review Paper on Analysis of Heat Transfer in Shell and Tube Type Heat Exchangers

A heat exchanger is a device that is used to transfer thermal energy (enthalpy) between two or more fluids, at different temperatures and in thermal contact The tube diameter, tube length, shell types etc. are all standardized and are available only in certain sizes and geometry. And so the design of a shell-and-tube heat exchanger usually involves a trial and error procedure where for a certain combination of the design variables the heat transfer area is calculated and then another combination is tried to check if there is any possibility of reducing the heat transfer area. A primary objective in the Heat Exchanger Design (HED) is the estimation of the minimum heat transfer area required for a given heat duty, as it governs the overall cost of the HE. But there is no concrete objective function that can be expressed explicitly as a function of the design variables and in fact many numbers of discrete combinations of the design variables are possible as is elaborated below. Traditional optimization techniques do not ensure global optimum and also have limited applications. In the recent past, some experts studied on the design, performance analysis and simulation studies on heat exchangers. Modeling is a representation of physical or chemical process by a set of mathematical relationships that adequately describe the significant process behavior. These models are often used for Process design, Safety system analysis and Process control. A steady state model for the outlet temperature of both the cold and hot fluid of a shell and tube heat exchanger will be developed and simulated, which will be verified with the experiments conducted. Based on these observations correlations to find film heat transfer coefficients will be developed during any process of refining of chemical manufacturing. Then these models are simulated on computer software. In this problem of heat transfer involved the condition where different constructional parameters are changed for getting the higher heat transfer rate within the thermal and hydraulic stability. And various models developed according to the change in physical parameters & results are obtained. These models were developed using latest computers tools like ANSYS, Fluent, and MATLAB etc.. The obtained results were also evaluated by comparing the same with the industrial operating exchanger and found satisfactory.