Research On The 3D Numerical Design Platform Of Shell-and-tube Heat Exchangers

The shell-and-tube heat exchanger is one of the most widely used heat exchangers in the industrial production, which plays an important part in chemical, metallurgy, oil refining, construction, machinery manufacturing, food, pharmaceuticals and aerospace and other industrial departments. This kind of heat exchange equipment is commonly according to user’s requirements to design and its design cycle should be as short as possible. While traditional way of artificial design has the following deficiencies:large workload of computing and drawing, long design cycle, low efficiency, which make it can not meet the design requirements at this stage. And the numerical simulation technology has developed rapidly in recent years, which is widely applied in heat exchanger design. Thus, with the development of computer hardware and software, developing specialized design platform has a wide range of practical significance and feasibility.This article is to develop the 3d design platform based on design features of the shell-and-tube heat exchanger, which combines process calculation,3d parameterized modeling and generating simplified model automatically. The main research contents are as follows:(1) Through the analysis of the design process and calculation program of the shell-and-tube heat exchanger, process design program was written by using VB language on the SolidWorks platform to achieve functions such as thermodynamic calculations based on LMTD, structural calculations and flow resistance calculation based on Esso method. VB language was used to operate Excel spreadsheet to output and save process design results in the form of report, making it convenient for designers to manage design documents.(2) Parametric design and secondary development technology were used on parts design of shell-and-tube heat exchangers to establish the standard model library for flanges, supports and so on by the use of parameter modification method. They can also be used on automatic cloth tube design for non-standard parts such as tube sheet, tube bundle and baffle plate by the use of driver programming method. In addition, design capabilities of the simplified model for the requirements of numerical simulation analysis and Simplify the model accordingly to realize the combination of CAD design and CFD numerical simulation(3) ANSYS Fluent software was used for numerical simulation of the heat exchanger shell side fluid to observe the flow and heat transfer phenomena under actual working conditions. The simulation results of 4 models with different baffle spacing from 50mm to 200mm were analyzed to verify the feasibility and necessity of using the numerical simulation technology in heat exchanger design and optimization of structural parameters with reference to part of the process calculation results.In this paper, the development of 3d numerical tube heat exchanger design platform can reduce the workload of design personnel to a great extent and shorten the design cycle; it is more clear and intuitive to design by using 3d platform and easy to combine with numerical simulation, which has certain practical values.