Review of heat transfer enhancement methods: Focus on passive methods using swirl flow devices

Economic reasons (material and energy saving) leads to make efforts for making more efficient heat exchange. The heat transfer enhancement techniques are widely used in many applications in the heating process to make possible reduction in weight and size or enhance the performance of heat exchangers. These techniques are classified as active and passive techniques. The active technique required external power while the passive technique does not need any external power. The passive techniques are valuable compared with the active techniques because the swirl inserts manufacturing process is simple and can be easily employed in an existing heat exchanger. Insertion of swirl flow devices enhance the convective heat transfer by making swirl into the bulk flow and disrupting the boundary layer at the tube surface due to repeated changes in the surface geometry. An effort has been made in this paper to carry out an extensive literature review of various turbulators (coiled tubes, extended surfaces (fin, louvered strip, winglet), rough surfaces (Corrugated tube, Rib) and swirl flow devices such as twisted tape, conical ring, snail entry turbulator, vortex rings, coiled wire) for enhancing heat transfer in heat exchangers. It can be concluded that wire coil gives better overall performance if the pressure drop penalty is considered. The use of coiled square wire turbulators leads to a considerable increase in heat transfer and friction loss over those of a smooth wall tube.