ORIGINAL Experimental investigation of shell-and-tube heat exchanger with a new type of baffles Yingshuang Wang • Zhichun Liu • Suyi Huang • Wei Liu • Weiwei Li Received: 9 July 2009 / Accepted: 3 March 2010 / Published online: 24 February 2011 Ó Springer-Verlag 2011 Abstract A shell-and-tube heat exchanger with new type of baffles, is designed, fabricated and tested. The experi- mental investigation for the proposed model and the ori- ginal segmental baffle heat exchanger are conducted. The operation performances of the two heat exchangers are also compared. The results suggest that, under the same con- ditions, the overall performance of the new model is 20–30% more efficient than that of the segmental baffle heat exchanger. 1 Introduction Heat exchanger is a very important apparatus in many fields, such as petroleum refining, power generation, chemical engineering, process industry, food industry, etc. Among the different types of heat exchangers, shell-and- tube heat exchanger (STHX) has many advantages such as reliable structure, mature techniques and wide applicabil- ity, which make it widely utilized in various industries [1]. The baffle element plays very important roles in STHX, such as supporting the tube bundles and disturbing the fluid of shell side. According the direction of fluid flow of shell side, the STHX can be divided into three groups: transverse flow, longitudinal flow and helical flow. The characteristics of pressure drop and heat transfer in shell side of the STHX vary under different flow states, which have a heavy impact on the performance of the heat exchangers. The traditional shell-and-tube heat exchanger with seg- mental baffles (SB-STHX) have many disadvantages, such as high pressure drop, low heat transfer efficiency, harmful vibration caused by the shell-side flow which is normal to tube bundles. When the traditional segmental baffles are used in STHX, higher pumping power is often required to offset the higher pressure drop under the same heat load. Therefore, a new type of STHX using different types of baffles might achieve higher heat transfer efficiency and lower pressure drop. Pressure drop and heat transfer are two interdependent factors influencing the capital and operating costs of the heat exchange systems. In order to improve the performance, heat exchangers with different types of baffles are developed, which have relatively higher heat transfer efficiency and relatively lower pressure drop, such as rod baffles and helical baffle exchangers [2–11]. Therefore, the main objectives of this study are to develop an STHX with new type of baffles to overcome the deficiencies mentioned above and to experimentally investigate its performance. Moreover, performance of the new STHX is also compared with that of SB-STHX in this study. 2 Configuration and fabrication of the STHX with new type of baffles The helical type of fluid flow in shell side of the STHX with helical baffles has led to some advantages such as high heat transfer efficiency and low flow resistance [5, 6, 8]. Nevertheless, it is difficult to manufacture the continuous helical baffles. In order to address this problem, flower baffles STHX (FB-STHX), a new type of STHX based on the traditional segmented baffle, is proposed in this paper and shown schematically as in Fig. 1. As seen in Fig. 1,a Y. Wang  Z. Liu (&)  S. Huang  W. Liu  W. Li School of Energy and Power Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, Hubei, People’s Republic of China e-mail: zcliu@mail.hust.edu.cn 123 Heat Mass Transfer (2011) 47:833–839 DOI 10.1007/s00231-010-0590-x