Assessment of Thermal Performance of Non-Conventional Grooved Stepped Shoe Ribs by CFD Technique

In improvement of the thermal performance there is necessity of the heat transfer augmentation. Heat transfer enhancement can be achieved with enlarged or extended surface, impeded boundary level, augmentation in the turbulence etc. It is desired to keep the size of heat exchanger compact for better working conditions. In the proposed work, we made the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis of the non-conventional type of ribs. In this work the non-conventional Stepped grooved shoe shaped ribs were studied by changing its geometry parameters like rib height (15, 20,22mm), thickness of the rib (4, 5,10 mm), and the ratio between these entities. The numerical analysis was done to study change in rate of heat transfer and pressure drop. The effects of variation in staggered arrangements and truncation gap on thermal performance were also studied. It was observed that providing staggered arrangement with truncation gap of 20 mm gives the optimum value of thermal enhancement factor of 1.33