The latent heat recovery from boiler exhaust flue gas using shell and corrugated tube heat exchanger: A numerical study

The excessively increasing environmental concerns along with reducing fossil fuel resources introduce the trend of increasing the efficiency of boiler via implementing waste heat recovery. In the present study, the potential of latent heat recovery is investigated in the middle-size boiler exhaust flue gas using the shell and corrugated tube heat exchanger. The main purpose of the present study is efficiency growth in flue gases using latent heat recovery of the steam energy. The heat recovery analysis is evaluated by a validated computational fluid dynamics model by a commercial software. For this study, the effect of different tube arrangements, number of tubes, and flow direction in the shell on heat transfer and pressure drop were investigated. The results showed that in-line arrangement of the tubes in the shell presents better thermal performance and also high pressure drop among the other arrangements. As a result, by considering the thermal performance and pressure drop, radial arrangement shows higher performance. According to the obtained results from Section 2 of the present study, by considering the radial arrangement of tubes in the shell, as the number of tube rises, the thermal performance declines.