A Numerical Approach to Study Shell-Side Fluid Flow in Shell-and-Tube Heat Exchangers

Abstract The detailed CFD simulation of the shell-side flow inside shell-and-tube heat exchangers results prohibitive for large-size components, due to the large number of tubes, together with the multi-scale nature of the flow features. To overcome this issue, the porous media approach can be adopted, substituting the tube bundle with a porous domain, where a suitable momentum sink term in the Navier-Stokes equation is provided. In this paper, a novel numerical approach to estimate the crossflow shell-side pressure drop is presented: a complete characterization of the tube bundle was performed by running 2D-CFD steady-state isothermal analyses, collecting pressure gradient magnitudes and d…