Numerical simulation of heat transfer and pressure drop of pseudo-plastic fluid in a pipe heat exchanger equipped with a modified twisted tape

The present paper, heat transfer and flow of shear-thinning non-Newtonian fluids in a circular tube under constant heat flux with a modified twisted tape, have been numerically studied in a laminar, steady-state and three-dimensional regime. The finite volume method was used to numerically solve the governing equations, modified power-law model be used to describe the dependence between the stresses and shear rates. The physical model is a circular tube with a standard twisted tape with decreasing its width, also a hollow tape in circular tube with an increase in the central cavity of the tape. The heat transfer and the overall performance are unfavorable by cutting off the tape edge. Instead, a decrease in tape width ratio, hollow tape with different removal ratios was used to improve thermal efficiency. the numerical results show that the removal ratio (hollow width of the tape divided by the initial width) equal to 0.3 in the fluids with behavioral indexes 0.86, 0.55 and 0.41 can cause 17.95%, 18.49% and 19.69% increase in thermal performance compared to the best thermal performance mode, respectively. Therefore, the hollow twisted tape is a promising technique for laminar convective heat transfer enhancement.