HT2008-56478 HEAT TRANSFER ENHANCEMENT IN TRIANGULAR FIN

ABSTRACT Fins are widely utilized in many industrial applications for example, fins are used in air cooled finned tube heat exchangers like car radiators, heat rejection devices, refrigeration systems and in condensing central heat exchangers. In this paper, heat transfer inside the fin system composed of a primary rectangular fin with a number of rectangular fins (secondary fins), which are attached on its surface, is modeled and analyzed numerically. The length of the secondary fins decreases linearly from the base of the primary fin to its tip. This modified triangular fin is a kind of improved tree fin networks. The effectiveness of the modified triangular fin is compared with the effectiveness of triangular fin which is calculated analytically. The results show that adding secondary fins increases the effectiveness of triangular fin significantly. Also, it is found that increasing the number of secondary fins in a constant length of primary fin will increase the effectiveness. In addition, by comparing the results it can be concluded that by shortening the length of the primary fin in modified triangular fin, the effectiveness will increase significantly to the contrary of the triangular fin, so smaller heat exchangers can be built by using the modified triangular fin. It is found that in a constant length of primary fin, there is an optimum thickness of secondary fins which maximize the effectiveness of the fin. INTRODUCTION The principle goal in improving the performance of existing thermal systems or in the design of new ones is to enhance heat transfer between hot or cold surfaces and the transport fluid. As such, several methods were proposed in the literature to achieve this task. These methods can be classifie