Comparative study of heat transfer enhancement and pressure drop for fin-and-circular tube compact heat exchangers with sinusoidal wavy and elliptical curved rectangular winglet vortex generator

•Performance of sinusoidal wavy and elliptical curved rectangular winglet vortex generators (RWVGs) are established.•The temperature and flow fields were presented and analyzed.•The effect of up and down configuration of VGs was evaluated.•The best performance can be achieved with the curved down type RWVGs. Vortex generation has emerged as a promising passive method for enhancing air-side heat transfer. In the present work, two-dimensional numerical analysis is carried out to examine the thermo-fluid analysis of fin-and-tube compact heat exchangers with sinusoidal wavy and elliptical curved type rectangular winglet vortex generator (RWVG) having varying Reynolds number ranges from 400 to 1000. The wavy and curved VGs are also placed as up and down configurations with respect to flow direction. Thus the effect of the different common flow down (CFD) configurations of wavy-up, wavy-down, curved-up, curved-down and flat rectangular winglet is compared with baseline configuration (non-winglet case) for flow structure, temperature distribution and pressure distribution for fin-and-tube compact heat exchanger with seven inline circular tube arrangement. They are also compared with thermo-hydraulic performance criterions which include Nusselt number (Nu), Pressure drop (ΔP), friction factor (f), London area goodness factor (j/f). Appreciable improvement in heat transfer characteristics is observed with wavy and curved rectangular winglet with a moderate loss in pressure. Compared with the non-winglet baseline and flat RWVG case, the heat transfer performance of the fin-and-tube heat exchanger is significantly improved with wavy-up and down and curved-up and down configurations. Further, it is also noted that up-wavy RWVG showed the best heat transfer improvement compared to any other RWVG configuration considered. However, Wavy-up configuration has the lowest values of j/f than others and curved-down has higher values of j/f than others. Thus, curved-down RWVG found suitable than other cases of RWVG as far as London goodness factor strategy.