Decaying swirl flow in round tubes with short-length twisted tapes

This paper presents experimental and numerical results of the local heat transfer coefficient and flow characteristics of decaying turbulent swirl flow generated by short-length twisted tapes (STs). The STs with three different twist ratios (y/W = 3, 4 and 5) were applied at the entrance of the test section. The experiments were conducted under uniform heat flux conditions for water flow rates in the range of 5200 ≤ Re ≤ 15,300. The results of the tube without swirl generator as well as the ones with full-length twisted tape (TTs) are also reported as the reference cases. The experimental results reveal that the tube with STs consistently yields higher local Nusselt number than that the one without swirl generator. The local Nusselt numbers decrease with increasing axial distance (x/D) due to the decaying effect. Although, STs consistently provide poorer heat transfer than TTs over the range studied, the STs with y/W = 4 and 5 yield superior thermal performance factors to the TTs at the same twist ratios, for Reynolds numbers beyond 10,000 due to the prominent effect of heat transfer improvement over that of the increase of friction factor. For better understanding, the visualization of flow structure (pathline and vector plot) in the tubes with STs is also presented.