Experimental study and comparative performance analysis on thermal-hydraulic characteristic of a novel longitudinal flow oil cooler

•A novel longitudinal flow twisted trifoliate tube oil cooler is proposed.•The performance of a twisted trifoliate tube oil cooler is experimentally studied.•The novel longitudinal flow oil cooler obtains better heat transfer performance.•Correlations of Nu and f for a twisted trifoliate tube oil cooler are obtained.•The application of longitudinal flow heat exchangers at low Re is extended. The longitudinal flow heat exchanger possesses lots of merits but it exhibits poor heat transfer coefficient at low Re condition, which makes it difficult to be applied in the high viscosity fluid area. In this paper, a heat transfer augment solution for lubricating oil flowing on shell side of a novel longitudinal flow twisted trifoliate tube oil cooler was proposed. Experiments were conducted to comparatively investigate the thermal–hydraulic performance of a twisted trifoliate tube oil cooler and a conventional segmental baffle oil cooler. The tube side study demonstrates that the Nu and f of the twisted trifoliate tube are 17.5–75.8% and 16.9–62.9% larger than that of the smooth circular tube. The shell side study shows that at the same oil mass flow rate, the shell side heat transfer coefficient of the twisted trifoliate tube oil cooler is 66.3–148.9% higher than that of the conventional segmental baffle oil cooler with pressure drop increased by 31.6–65.2%. Furthermore, the shell side performance evaluation criterion h/ΔP of the twisted trifoliate tube oil cooler is 1.46 times larger than that of the conventional segmental baffle oil cooler on average. The possible mechanisms responsible for the heat transfer enhancement are analyzed. In addition, the predictive correlations of tube side and shell side of the twisted trifoliate tube bundles for Nu and f are deduced based on the experimental data. Results from current research could provide useful correlations and beneficial guidance for design and application of the longitudinal flow heat exchanger in low Re ranging of 40–250.