## UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

8-1-2018

Thesis

#### Degree Name

Master of Science in Engineering (MSE)

#### Department

Mechanical Engineering

Samir Moujaes

William Culbreth

Mohamed Trabia

Stephen Lepp

63

#### Abstract

In this study we investigate the air-side cooling of a flat-plate fin and tube heat transfer condenser with numerical simulations. A new design is proposed which utilises vortex generators to direct the flow in such a way as to remove some of the stagnant heated air that collects in the wake of the pipes. A comparative study of the proposed design and a standard tube and fin condenser is conducted by varying the air side entrance velocities. The Shear Stress Tension, SST $\kappa - \omega$ 2-equation turbulent model is used to solve the RANS model in ANSYS Fluent 18. The results show an improved heat transfer gain with the proposed model at the expense of a greater pressure drop. We explain various analysis of the results concluding that the gains in heat transfer at higher air side face velocities are greater than the expense of power and that the proposed model is predicted to yield a flat-plate fin and pipe condenser that is more compact and energy efficient than the standard design. We predict the improvement of ideal power consumption over typical operating conditions on our portion of the condenser to be between 7\% and 15\%.

#### Keywords

condenser; flow channel; fluid dynamics; heat transfer

#### Disciplines

Mechanical Engineering

pdf

English