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Highlights • A helical coil with reversed loops show unique pressure drop and heat transfer characteristics. • The thermal effectiveness of a common helical coil can be improved by adding reversed loops. • Adding reversed loops may enhance turbulence mixing in helical coil heat exchanger. • New friction factor and heat transfer correlations for a helical coil with reversed loops have been postulated. Abstract In this experimental study, flow and heat transfer characteristics of water through a newly designed helical coil heat transfer test section were investigated. A structural modification of the traditional helical coil has been implemented to improve its thermal effectiveness. Specifically, a 360° plastic reversed loop was added after each 180° of the main helical coil loop to redistribute the flow’s velocity profile, which should have a direct effect on the thermal performance of the helical coil heat transfer test section. Results reveal that reversed loops do enhance heat transfer rates by more than 20%, while pressure drop penalty also increases but not at the same rate. The curvature of the reversed loops with respect to the main coil is a critical factor in terms of thermal performance. Furthermore, as the size of the reversed loop decreases, the heat transfer enhancement and pressure drop penalty increment for the modified helical coil test section increase as well. Accordingly, it is suggested that there may exist an optimum helical coil structural modification for which the best tradeoff between pressure drop penalty and heat transfer enhancement can be found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The steady laminar fluid flow and heat transfer characteristics in the channel formed by the flat tube and the dimpled fin are investigated numerically. The results show that the dimple radius, the dimple pitch and the fin spacing affect the average Nusselt number and friction factor, while the effect of the dimple radius and the fin spacing is larger than that of the dimple pitch. The average Nusselt number, the friction factor and the intensity of secondary flow in the dimpled fin case are larger than those in the plain fin case at the same Re , respectively. The correlations of Nusselt number, the friction factor with Re and other parameters are reported. The significant result is that whenever the same intensity of secondary flow is produced by increasing the radius of the dimples or other structural parameter such as increasing the fin spacing and the dimple pitch, the same heat transfer intensity is obtained. This implies that the intensity of secondary flow determines the heat transfer characteristics on the fin surfaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: A computational fluid dynamics methodology is developed to study steady laminar flow and heat transfer in periodic zigzag channels with square cross-sections, considering the effect of chaotic advection. The computational domain consists of up to 14 repeating zigzag units with smoothly joined inlet and outlet sections. The results show fully-developed periodic flow fields can be achieved for Re <200; however, a spatially periodic flow field is no longer seen for higher Reynolds number due to the enhanced effect of chaotic advection with increasing Reynolds number; for Re >400 the flow field becomes transient. The flow field shows that the secondary flow pattern varies significantly at different axial locations. Highly enhanced heat transfer appears in the regions where strong Dean vortices occur, as indicated by more pronounced twisting of flow streaklines. For Re >200, the unit-averaged heat transfer enhancement and pressure-drop penalty (relative to straight passages) are no longer uniform from unit to unit but mean values of both of these performance metrics increase with increasing Reynolds number over the whole range of 50< Re <400. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]