Fluid flow and heat transfer in an air-to-water double-pipe heat exchanger

This paper reports experimental and numerical investigations on flow and heat transfer in an air-to-water double-pipe heat exchanger. The working fluids are air and water. To achieve fully developed conditions, the heat exchanger was built with additional lengths before and after the test section. The inner and outer tube was made from copper and Plexiglas, respectively. The experiments are conducted in the range of air flow Reynolds number for various cases with different water flow rate and water inlet temperature. Correlations for the Nusselt number and friction factor are presented according to experimental data. Also the commercial code ANSYS 15 is used for numerical simulation. Results show that the Nusselt number is an increasing function of Reynolds number and Prandtl number which are calculated at bulk temperature.