CHEMICAL ENGINEERING TRANSACTIONS VOL. 70, 2018 A publication of The Italian Association of Chemical Engineering Online at www.aidic.it/cet Guest Editors: Timothy G. Walmsley, Petar S. Varbanov, Rongxin Su, Jiří J. Klemeš Copyright © 2018, AIDIC Servizi S.r.l. ISBN 978-88-95608-67-9; ISSN 2283-9216 Parametric Study of Finned Surfaces Using a Graphical User Interface Developed in Matlab Luis G. Obregon a, *, Juan B. Restrepo a , Guillermo E. Valencia b a Chemical Engineering Department, Universidad del Atlántico, km 7 Antigua vía Puerto, Barranquilla, Colombia; b Mechanical Engineering Department, Universidad del Atlántico, km 7 Antigua vía Puerto, Barranquilla, Colombia luisobregon@mail.uniatlantico.edu.co The use of heat exchangers on extended surfaces has obtained high importance in the last years due to their high implementation in industrial processes, computer systems, refrigerators, electronic equipment, etc. It implies the use of computer technology to have a better comprehension of the phenomena that involve heat transfer in finned surfaces to design new prototypes with high efficiency. There are lots of parameters to consider when designing fins such as their geometry and the type of material making the design highly complex. Also, a selection of adequate fins requires knowledge of temperature distributions through them, which will depend on the properties of the fin material. In this article, it is presented the study of the energy transfer and effectiveness in Extended Surfaces using an educational graphical user interface developed in Matlab as a pedagogical strategy to promote the significant learning in engineering. The program uses the most important experimental correlations reported in the literature for solving real problems. The systems studied were Straight Rectangular Fins, Straight Triangular Fins, Cylindrical Pin Fins, and Straight Parabolic Fins, all the cases with air as refrigerant and Aluminum, Copper, Iron, and Stainless Steel as the fin working materials. Three case studies were made, the total heat transfer of the fins as a function of air velocity for different geometric configurations and materials of the fins to see the effect of the natural and forced convection, the effect of convection in the efficiency of the fins, and the effectiveness as a function of thermal conductivity of the fins for the geometrical configurations mentioned above. It was found that the configuration with the highest removal of heat was the straight rectangular fin. The cylindrical fin presented the highest efficiency, and the best working material was the copper. 1. Introduction The chemical and process industries in general, generate large amounts of heat that must be dissipated so that they can be operated efficiently. There are many different types of heat exchangers that help to remove this heat. However, the most efficient heat exchangers are those with extended surfaces, usually called fins. The high efficiency is due to their large amount of area in contact with the surroundings. They are highly used in a large number of applications (Stehlík at al., 2014) such as, Industrial processes, vehicles, computers, refrigerators, among other things that need a special control of temperature. There are different parameters to consider in detail at the moment of designing a fin heat exchanger such as the shape, thickness, length, material, space, and number of fins. The natural shape of fin heat exchanger causes high external fluid friction that must be considered. The temperature distribution has to be known before building an extended surface heat exchanger which depends on the parameters previously mentioned. A great number of investigations have been done about fin heat exchangers such as the study of a high-temperature heat exchanger with hybrid internally and externally finned tubes (Zhang et al., 2017), the air side heat exchanger performance under the effect of louver angle (Hrnjak et al., 2017), the optimization of variable louver angle and initial louver angle solved numerically using commercial CFD (Jang and Chen, 2015), the heat transfer performance of a fin heat exchanger and the frost behavior at the middle of louver fin surfaces (Park et al., 2017), experimental investigation of the effect of different inlet constructions on the distribution of two-phase flow in a plate-fin heat exchanger (Zhang et al., 2017), the effect of the fin length and spacing on the thermal DOI: 10.3303/CET1870314 Please cite this article as: Obregon L.G., Restrepo J.B., Valencia G.E., 2018, Parametric study of finned surfaces using a graphical user interface developed in matlab , Chemical Engineering Transactions, 70, 1879-1884 DOI:10.3303/CET1870314 1879