FINITE VOLUME ALGORITHM TO STUDY THE EFFECT OF TUBE SEPARATION IN FLOW PAST CHANNEL CONFINED TUBE BANKS

Numerical investigations are carried out to study the effect of tube separation on flow and heat transfer characteristics for flow past circular tube bundles confined within a rectangular channel. The tube separation has been varied for cross flow of air past inline and staggered arrangements of tubes in such a way that in staggered arrangement, center of an upstream tube and centers of two respective downstream tubes from an equilateral triangle. A three-dimensional computational code based on SIMPLE method using finite volume technique has been developed to solve the governing equations. A body-fitted structured grid has been generated for discretization of the incompressible form of conservation equations of mass, momentum and energy. The flow and heat transfer characteristics for different values of tube separation have been compared using streamline plots, temperature contours, span-averaged pressure drop along length of the channel and span-averaged Nusselt number variation near heated/cooled surfaces.