CFD ANALYSIS OF HEAT EXCHANGER FOR EXHAUST GAS HEAT RECOVERY IN A GAS BASED POWER PLANT

Abstract

Energy is one of the most important components of
economic growth. But day by day the existing energy resources
are depleting at alarming rate. Hence it is necessary to
introduce alternate techniques to conserve the energy effectively.
With this an attempt has been made to introduce a ceramic heat
exchanger with different cross sections.Early Heat Exchangers
provide the foundation for numerous applications in process
intensification subjected to un satisfactory mass distribution ,
thermal stresses arising from uneven heating and cooling etc. In
order to overcome the difficulties mentioned above, Ceramic
materials have been introduced in place of existing materials.
Since ceramic materials offer many benefits including high
temperature capacity and corrosion resistance. Special and
specific design of the heat exchanger surfaces in ceramic heat
exchanger surfaces provide equal distribution of inlet flows.
In this project Ceramic heat exchanger of varying
tubes were simulated by computational fluid dynamics
method(CFD).The multi shaped structure was imported in to
fluent 18.2 versions as a physical model. A ceramic monolith
heat exchanger is designed to find out the performance and
effectivenessof heat transfer. The numerical computation was
performed throughout the domain including fluid region in
exhaust gas side, ceramic core and fluid region in air side. The
entire computation was carried out by using different cross
sections viz., Rectangular, Elliptical and Cylindrical duct with
air and exhaust in cross flow direction. After comparison of
theoretical and numerical computation it is observed that the
estimated heat transfer rate in numerical analysis is 15% more
than the theoretical analysis