THE EXPERIMENTAL AND NUMERICAL INVESTIGATION OF THE THERMAL BEHAVIORS OF A JACKETED HEAT EXCHANGER WITH A STIRRER

Abstract

In this study, the thermal performance of a jacketed heat exchanger with a stirrer was experimentally and numerically investigated under different jacket side water inlet temperature and flow rate conditions. In the numerical study, a three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD)model of the heat exchanger was generated and the analyzes were performed with the ANSYS-Fluent software package. In addition, a stirrer was added to both the experimental and the numerical study to obtain the effects of the stirrer on the temperature and velocity values of the water in the tank. It was seen that the results of the analyzes performed under similar conditions to the experimental study were in good agreement with the experimental study. It was concluded that the effect of the flow rate decreases with increasing inlet temperature. When the stirrer was activated and the flow rate was increased from 0.5 to 2.5 l/min in 30, 40, and 50°C inlet temperature conditions, the time to reach the target temperature inside the tank decreased from approximately 1600 to 900, from 2500 to 1350, and from 4900 to 1400, respectively. In general, it was observed that the effect of the stirrer increased with increasing inlet temperature in all flow rate conditions.