EMbaffle® is a patented shell and tube heat exchanger technology, designed to improve performance and reduce pressure drops. In the EMbaffle® design, tubes are fully supported by expanded metal grids (EM-Grids) allowing a pure longitudinal flow pattern. A CFD model of a representative portion of the heat exchanger has been recently implemented by EMbaffle in collaboration with EnginSoft; ANSYS CFX was used as solver.
Papers presented at the previous CAE conferences mainly investigated the interaction between fluid and grid. Although CFD analysis outcomes granted a basic comprehension of the mechanism of turbulence generation, a few results comparison with HTRI Xchanger Suite SW showed that both exchanged duty and pressure drops are considerably underpredicted, independently from the adopted turbulence model.
The intensive tests campaign on gas fluids with increasing Reynolds number recently performed confirmed the correctness of the HTRI SW algorithms. This new work focuses on a straight comparison between experimental tests data and CFD results and the representativeness level of the adopted turbulence Models is questioned.