Experimental measurement and numerical computation of the air side convective heat transfer coefficients in a plate fin-tube heat exchanger

The air-side forced convective heat transfer of a plate fin-tube heat exchanger is investigated by experimental measurement and numerical computation. The heat exchanger consists of a staggered arrangement of refrigerant pipes with a diameter of 10.2 mm and a fin pitch of 3.5 mm. In the experimental study, the forced convective heat transfer was measured at Reynolds numbers of 1082, 1397, 1486, 1591 and 1649 based on the diameter of the refrigerant piping and on the maximum velocity. The average Nusselt number for the convective heat transfer coefficient was also computed for the same Reynolds number by using the commercial software STAR-CD with the standard k - ɛ turbulent model. It was found that the relative errors of the average Nusselt numbers between the experimental and numerical data were less than 6 percent in a Reynolds number range of 1082∼1649. The errors between the experiment and other correlations from literature ranged from 7% to 32.4%. However, the literature correlation of Kim et al. is closest to the experimental data within a relative error of 7%.