CFD ANALYSIS OF A PRESSURE DROP IN A STAGGRED TUBE BUNDLE FOR A TURBULENT CROSS FLOW

Abstract: Modelling and prediction of pressure drop across a staggered tube bundle for a liquid flow is an emerging development in the area of computational fluid dynamics. The present work discuss about the predictionof pressure drop using CFD and compared with theoretically estimated values using well known empirical friction factor correlations for model validation.Turbulence modelssuch asa standard k-epsilon, a standard k-omegaand a k-omega basedshear stress transportwereused for predicting the pressure drop in the tube bundleat same grid density. The primary objective of the present work is to find out which of these turbulence models predicts pressure drop values close to empirical correlations developed based on experiments similar to the present study. Transverse pitch ratio of2.5and longitudinal pitch ratio of 0.7 with 30o tube angle arrangement is chosen for thisstudy.For accurate prediction of pressure drop across the bundle fine grids were created around the tube portions. Grid independent study has been carried out for identifying suitable grid size for simulation.

Keywords: k-epsilon, k-omega, k-omega based shear stress transport, Pitch ratio, staggered tube bundle, Fluent 14.0.0