Falling film evaporation on a thermal spray metal coated vertical corrugated plate conduits

Abstract

In falling film evaporation process, the heat is transferred from the condensing fluid side to the liquid flowing on evaporating side. Tube geometry and tube size have an important role on the performance of the falling film evaporators. The current article presents a two-dimensional computational fluid dynamics study of water falling film evaporation on a thermal spray metal coated vertical corrugated conduits. Two-phase flow simulation is carried out by using a finite volume method-based commercial software, using k-ω equations with shear stress transport. Sinusoidal corrugations with different porosity have been selected for this study. Heat and mass transfer during falling film evaporation are included through user defined functions. Effect of Reynolds number, wall superheat, and surface roughness on heat transfer coefficient is presented. Numerical results are compared with the results of horizontal circular tube, as well as corrugated plate conduits falling film evaporation from literature. An enhancement of film heat transfer coefficient of about 15% is observed for the vertical corrugated plate conduits.