Comparison of Theoretical and Numerical Analysis of Shell and Tube Heat Exchanger

In this paper, the simplified approach using commercial computer software code was adopted to predict the performance of a kettle typed shell and tube heat exchanger. Similarly the numerical analysis using ANSYS/CFX is conducted for the same design and the result data are collected to analyze its performance numerically. In general, the heat exchanger performances are evaluated by predicting the temperature difference and pressure drop. The result data of both the analysis are compared to find the differences between the data. From the comparison, we came to know that the error percentage between the two analysis results is very low which is acceptable proving our design is convincible. Thereby we fabricated a prototype model of shell and tube heat exchanger (kettle type) with the same parameters used for these analyses.