Thermal characterization in a circular tube fitted with inclined horseshoe baffles

In the present study, the influence of inclined horseshoes baffles placed repeatedly in a tubular heat exchanger on heat transfer rate, friction factor and thermal enhancement factor are experimentally determined. The horseshoe baffle elements with an inclination angle of 20° were inserted periodically into the test tube at three different baffle-pitch ratios (PR = 0.5, 1.0 and 2) and -width or blockage ratios (BR = 0.1, 0.15 and 0.2). The experiment was conducted in the test tube having a uniform heat-fluxed wall by varying turbulent airflow to obtain Reynolds number in a range of 5300–24,000. The experimental results revealed that the tube fitted with inclined horseshoes baffles provides considerable improvement of the heat transfer rate over the plain tube around 92–208% while the friction factor is increased at about 1.76–6.37 times. To access the real benefits for the inclined horseshoes baffles inserted in plain tube, thermal performance factor is examined and found to be in the range of 1.34–1.92 at which the maximum obtained at PR = 0.5 and BR = 0.1 is considerably higher than that for published inserted devices. Correlations for Nusselt number and friction factor for the oblique horseshoe-baffled tube are also proposed.