International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 101 (2016) 667681

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International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijhmt

Enhancement of heat transfer in a fin-tube heat exchanger using

rectangular winglet type vortex generators
Anupam Sinha a, Himadri Chattopadhyay b,, Ashwin Kannan Iyengar c, Gautam Biswas d
a
Aerosystems Laboratory, CSIR-Central Mechanical Engineering Research Institute, Durgapur 713209, India
b
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Jadavpur University, Kolkata 700032, India
c
Ashok Leyland Limited, Chennai 600057, India
d
Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Guwahati 781039, India

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: The present study simulates the air flow through fin-tube type heat exchangers with rectangular winglet
Received 19 November 2015 pairs (RWP) of half the channel height as vortex generators (VG). The heat exchanger is approximated as a
Received in revised form 21 March 2016 periodic rectangular channel with heated walls and three rows of built-in tubes placed at an appropriate
Accepted 6 May 2016
interval. Two different orientations of the tubes in the heat exchangers are considered here one with
Available online 6 June 2016
inline arrangement of three tube rows and the other with staggered arrangement of three tube rows.
Further, the angles of attack in each orientation are varied. The heat transfer characteristics of the heat
Keywords:
exchangers with vortex generators located near the tubes have been compared among the cases with var-
Heat transfer
Enhancement
ied angles of attack and orientations of tubes. The NavierStokes and energy equations along with the
Fin tube heat exchanger appropriate boundary conditions are solved using the ANSYS FLUENT 14.5 solver. Performance parame-
Vortex generator ters in terms of Nusselt number, vorticity and quality factor (a ratio between the Colburn factor to appar-
Common-flow-up (CFU) ent friction factor, also refer to as area goodness factor with slight modification) were evaluated. The
Common-flow-down (CFD) results show significant improvement in the heat transfer performance due to the nozzle-like flow pas-
sages created by the winglet pair and the region behind the circular tube which promote accelerating
flow. There is an increasing trend of the above for the in-line row of tubes; whereas with the staggered
row of tubes, there is slight deviation of this trend. Due to the alternate CFDCFU orientations of the VG,
the performance improves with increase in angle of attack up to a certain point and afterwards it is going
down.
2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction profound implications on the energy conversion and HVAC&R sys-

In energy transfer related applications, heat exchanger perfor-
mance is of great importance in meeting todays stringent energy
efficiency standards with low cost and less environmental impact.
In the liquid-to-gas and phase-change heat exchangers, typical to
many Heating, Ventilating and Air Conditioning & Refrigeration
(HVAC&R) systems, the gas-side thermal resistance contributes
heavily to the overall thermal resistance. The vortex generators
have shown great promise in enhancing air/gas-side heat transfer
coefficient. With increasing energy costs and new regulations
aimed at achieving higher efficiency and better environmental pro-
tection, heat exchanger performance will continue to play very
important role. Achieving overall performance enhancement in
the above mentioned heat exchanger geometry is expected to have
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: chimadri@gmail.com (H. Chattopadhyay).
tems. Vortex generators (VG) induce streamwise longitudinal vor-
tices in the flow field. Such vortices impart strong swirling action
causing destabilization of thermal boundary-layer and in some
cases leading to unsteady oscillatory motion. Apart from these
well-known mechanisms of heat transfer enhancement, the place-
ment, shape and orientation of the VGs can yield additional aug-
mentation through management of wake structure behind the
tubes.
It was shown experimentally by Jacobi and Shah [1] and Tiggel-
beck et al. [2] that the longitudinal vortices generated by surface-
mounted delta-wings and winglet pairs are indeed very effective
for heat transfer enhancement. Over the years, various researchers
had shown that VGs are capable to enhance heat transfer for both
fin-tube and plate-fin heat exchangers. In case of plate-fin heat
exchangers, protrusions can be mounted on the channel surfaces
to enhance heat transfer between flowing fluid and closely placed
parallel plate channels [35]. The two most commonly reported VG
placement strategies are the so called common-flow-down (CFD)

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijheatmasstransfer.2016.05.032
0017-9310/ 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
668 A. Sinha et al. / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 101 (2016) 667681

Nomenclature

B channel width Greek symbols

cp specific heat a thermal diffusivity
h heat transfer coefficient b angle of attack
k thermal conductivity l dynamic viscosity
Nu Nusselt number m kinematic viscosity
p pressure q density
Pr Prandtl number C vorticity
q heat flux
fapp apparent friction factor Subscripts
Qf quality factor av average
Re Reynolds number b fluid bulk quantity
T temperature i, j tensor notations
ui local velocity in at inlet
Uav average velocity pl plane channel without VG
xi tensor coordinate direction sa spanwise
w the channel wall (fin surface)

Fig. 1. Computational domain: (a) in-line rows with winglets, (b) staggered rows with winglets (angle of attack = 165) (1 and 2 in figures denotes pressure side and non-
pressure side, respectively).
 A. Sinha et al. / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 101 (2016) 667681
and the common-flow-up (CFU) approaches for a single fin-tube
element. CFU means the VGs on the air/gas side are placed in such
a way that the resulting vortices rotate to move the fluid between
them away from the surface on which they are mounted. CFD
means the flow stream between the two vortices is directed
toward the surface on which they are mounted. The earlier inves-
tigations reported in the literature [79] reveal that in a CFD
arrangement, the VGs are placed as a pair downstream of the tube
in the near-wake region in order to introduce high-momentum
fluid behind the tube and remove the zone of poor heat transfer
from the wake region. In CFU approach [1012], the VGs are usu-
ally deployed slightly upstream adjacent to the tube such that
the winglet forms a constricted passage with the tube, leading
the fluid to accelerate in the near-tube region. The arrangement
is intended to cause separation delay and narrow the wake. The
heat transfer enhancement due to vortex generation is usually
accompanied by additional pressure loss attributed to the form
drag associated with the VG. Joardar and Jacobi [13] studied the
performance of leading edge delta-wings in a flat tube, louvered-
fin compact heat exchanger under both dry- and wet-surface con-
ditions. They reported an average heat transfer (j-factor) increase
over the baseline case of 21% for dry conditions and 23.4% for
wet conditions, with a pressure drop penalty smaller than 7%. Bis-
was and Chattopadhyay [5] analyzed the flow structure and heat
transfer in a fin-tube heat exchanger with built-in delta winglet
pairs. The tube rows were arranged in a staggered design, and a
punched-out delta winglet pair with an aspect ratio of 2 was
Fig. 2. (a) Mesh of the bottom plate by hiding other features, (b) cut-views of the mesh near the tube & winglet (angle of attack = 165).
669
located behind each tube at an attack angle of 45. At a Reynolds
number of 500, heat transfer enhancement of about 240% was
reported at a location about 12 times the channel height down-
stream of the inlet. The spanwise-average Nusselt number at
Re = 646 compared favorably with experimental results for the
same geometry.
Wu and Tao [14] and He et al. [15] used punched rectangular &
triangular VGs to study the effects of the positions, surface area
over the heat transfer augmentation. Wang et al. [16] demon-
strated the performance enhancement by using plain, louver and
semi-dimple VG. Jang et al. [17] studied the effect of the VG span
angle and VG transverse location on the heat exchanger perfor-
mance for both in-line and staggered plate-fin and tube heat
exchangers. Due to the positioning of the winglets, the in-line tube
arrangement was having better heat transfer in comparison to the
staggered arrangement. The alternate changing of the vortex direc-
tions due t the placements of the winglets in the staggered orien-
tation was not highlighted properly. Habchi and Harion [18,19]
extended the application of VG to a laminar circular pipe flow
and optimized the distance and angular positions to enhance the
mixing process. Sinha et al. [20] studied the effects of different
combinations of CFU and CFD orientations of winglet arrays on
the performance of plate-fin type heat exchangers. Tian et al.
[21] compared the performances of plate-fin type heat exchangers
with both delta winglet pairs (DWP) and rectangular winglet pairs
(RWP) for Re up to 1200 and it was shown that RWP performs bet-
ter than DWP when only the heat transfer enhancement only is
670 A. Sinha et al. / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 101 (2016) 667681

Fig. 3. Comparison of velocity vectors (resultant of v & w) at X = (a) 0.02, (b) 0.045, (c) 0.07 cross sections at Re = 1500 for inline row of tubes with angle of attack = 165.

Fig. 4. Comparison of velocity vectors (resultant of v & w) at X = (a) 0.02, (b) 0.045, (c) 0.0508, (d) 0.0635, (e) 0.07, (f) 0.0762 cross sections at Re = 1500 for staggered row of
tubes with angle of attack = 165.
 A. Sinha et al. / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 101 (2016) 667681
considered. Similar studies by Saha et al. [22] with very low Re, has
also demonstrated that compared to DWP, RWP produces more
heat transfer enhancement and the difference increases with
increase in Reynolds number. However, the RWP develops slightly
higher pressure drop that DWP.
In the present study, the above observation has been carried
forward for fin-tube type heat exchangers. A RWP of half the chan-
nel height have been considered as VG in a CFU configuration. In
addition to the study for inline tube rows, the effect of staggering
the tube rows was also carried out. With this staggered configura-
tion of tube rows, both the CFU and CFD strategies are encountered
simultaneously. In order to understand this, the pressure side of
the VG has been marked as 1 whereas the non-pressure side has
been marked as 2 in Fig. 1a and b. It is expected that due to this
alternate configurations encountered by the flow different patterns
of vortex shedding will be uncovered. Moreover, the angles of
attack are also varied in these configurations. It is envisaged that
eventually this may lead to significant heat transfer enhancement
in fin-tube type heat exchangers.
Fig. 5. Comparison of temperature contours at t = 75 for Z = H/2 plane and Re = 1500 for (a) base in-line, (b) base staggered, (c) in-line row with winglets, (d) staggered row
with winglets (angle of attack = 165).
671
2. Problem formulation
The detailed dimensions of the computational domain are
shown in Fig. 1a and b. Two neighboring fins form a channel with
height H = 0.0036 m, B = 7.06H, and the length L = 24.7H. The tube
having a diameter D = 2.96H is located at a distance L1 = 3.53H
from the inlet. Two winglets are symmetrically placed about the
channel centerline. The length of each winglet is l = 2.93H, height
is h1 = 0.5H, and the thickness is t1 = 0.027H. Leading edges of the
winglet are located at a distance XA = 1.28H and ZA = 0.63H from
the inlet and side planes, respectively. The winglets are kept at
an angle of attack of 165. In the figures, the notations 1 and 2
alongside the winglets denote pressure and non-pressure sides
respectively. The second and third set of tubes and the winglet
pairs are at a distance of L2 = 7.06H from the first and second tube
respectively. The Reynolds Number is defined on the basis of aver-
age axial velocity at the inlet and the characteristic dimension (2H)
of the channel as Re = (q Uav2H)/l, where q is the density of the
fluid, Uav is the inlet free stream velocity and l is the viscosity.
672 A. Sinha et al. / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 101 (2016) 667681

The inlet air temperature is taken as 300 K, whereas the walls @ui
0 1
(tubes, fins, and winglets) are at a temperature of 330 K. Also the @xi
fin surfaces, the tubes and the vortex generators were assumed 

@uj @ui uj @p 1 @ @ui @uj
to be isothermal and at same temperature.  2
@t @xj @xj Re @xj @xj @xi
2.1. Governing equations

@h @ui h 1 @ @h
3
@t @xi RePr @xj @xj
The dimensionless equations for continuity, momentum and
energy for this problem may be expressed in their conservative For non-dimensionalization, the following transformation has
form as been used

Fig. 6. Comparison of velocity profiles at Z = H/2 plane and Re = 1500 for (a) base in-line, (b) base staggered, (c) in-line row with winglets, (d) staggered row with winglets
(angle of attack = 165) (velocity unit is in m/s).
 A. Sinha et al. / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 101 (2016) 667681 673

xi u p T  T1 t  U av 4. Pertinent performance parameters

xi ; ui i ; p ; h ; t 4
H U av q U av
2 Tw  T1 H
In this investigation, local x component of vorticity and the
In the above expressions, U av is the average velocity at the inlet,
span-averaged x component of vorticity are defined in the follow-
T 1 is the temperature of the incoming stream (300 K), T w is the
ing way [25]:
wall temperature (330 K) and all starred quantities are dimen-

sional variables. The Reynolds number is defined on the basis of 1 @w @ v
Cx  8
average axial velocity at the inlet and the characteristic dimension 2 @y @z
(2H) of the channel as Re = (q Uav 2H)/l. Z  
1 1 @w @ v 
Csa   dydz 9
 @z 
2 Ayz Ayz @y
2.2. Boundary conditions
It is worth mentioning that Prabhakar et al. [25], Chang et al.
[26] and Zhu et al. [27] have indicated the average stream-wise
At the entrance (at x = 0), the Dirichlet type condition is used for
vorticity at a given cross-section strongly influences the heat trans-
velocity and temperatures as:
fer characteristics at that section.
In order to have a quantitative estimation of the heat transfer
u uy; v 0; w 0; h 0 5
performance, the combined span wise average Nusselt number is
A fully developed velocity profile for the axial velocity is used calculated in the following manner at each longitudinal location
with Re varying from 250 to 1500. in the channel [3,5,12].
The walls (fin, tube and winglet surfaces) are assumed to be Bq1 q2 2H=k
impermeable and at constant temperature leading to Nusa R B RB 10
0
T w1 x; z  T b xdz 0
T w2 x; z  T b xdz
v 0; u w 0; h 1 6 The average Nusselt number in a channel from the inlet up to
any axial location at the downstream is calculated using the value
At channel exit (x = L/H), pressure boundary condition is used
of the combined span wise average Nusselt number as
implying vanishing gauge pressure at the exit. For temperature a
vanishing derivative is prescribed.

@T
p 0; 0 7
@x
It may be mentioned here that the geometry considered is a
part of the periodic domain and hence periodic boundary condition
has been deployed in the side walls. For implementation of period-
icity in FLUENT, zero mass flow rate in the spanwise direction was
assumed. Prescribing positive values of mass flow rate in the z-
direction even about 5% of the incoming flow, did not produce
any significant effect in heat transfer distribution.

3. Grid generation and computation

The grid generated using ANSYS ICEM-CFD 14.5 consists of hex-

ahedral grids only in a structured multi-block arrangement aligned
with the flow as represented in the Fig. 2a and b. The aligning of
the grids avoids undesirable numerical diffusion and leads to bet-
ter convergence. Very fine grids in the vicinity of the tubes and
winglets have been employed as the gradients were expected to
be large in this zone. The number of grids for these cases is typi-
cally 6.8 million.
The governing equations are discretised by the finite volume
method. The SIMPLE algorithm [23] is utilized to deal with the cou-
pling of pressure and velocity. The second-order upwind scheme is
employed for the discretization of convection terms, whereas the
diffusion terms are discretised by the central difference scheme.
In this work transient solution is carried out in a very fine mesh
with an objective to compute time-averaged values of engineering
interests such as Nusselt number and friction factors.
The aforesaid governing equations are solved by a segregated
implicit iterative scheme using the commercial version of ANSYS
FLUENT 14.5 [24]. A fixed time step of 0.001 s has been selected
and the unsteady case is run for at least 5000 time steps. Compu-
tations were performed on an IBM Cluster machine utilizing 32
CPU cores with 2 GB memory per core. The computation time of Fig. 7. Comparison of velocity contours at different cross sections along the flow
each of these cases is about 150 h. directions at Re = 1500 for staggered row of tubes with angle of attack = 165.
674 A. Sinha et al. / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 101 (2016) 667681

Z x
1 The variation of these performance parameters with respect to
Nux Nusa dx 11
x 0 different input parameters and configurations will be discussed in
subsequent sections. In absence of experimental data code valida-
The pressure drop in the channel is evaluated by using the
tion has been performed by simulating a channel in presence of a
apparent friction factor fapp defined by Shah and London [28] as
delta wing as reported in Biswas and Chattopadhyay [5]. The calcu-
!

P1  P2 2H lated Nusselt number and friction factors from this study agreed
f app q 12 within 5% to the results reported in [5].
2
U 2av Dx

In the above equation index 1 means inlet, index 2 means any

axial location at the downstream and Dx indicates the distance
between locations 1 and 2. The parameter 2H is the characteristic
dimension (hydraulic diameter) of the channel.
In order to summarize the performance of the winglet type vor-
tex generators, a quality factor (Qf) [12,20] is defined as the ratio of
the mean-Colburn-factor to the apparent friction-factor over a
zone from the inlet to any axial location in the channel as
Nux
j Re:Pr1=3
Qf f 13
f app
8:0
This parameter combines heat transfer with pressure drop and
thus forms a basis of comparison for transport augmentation.
5. Results and discussion
The main objective of the present study is to determine the
effects of the tube and winglet arrangements on the flow structure
and the overall heat transfer augmentation for a fin-tube type heat
exchanger. Thus investigations with two different configurations of
fin-tube heat exchanger, one with in-line rows of tube and the
other with staggered row of tubes along with winglet geometry
under different angle of attacks have been conducted. The angle
of attacks for both the cases are kept as 170, 165 and 160. In
Fig. 1(a), three in-line rows of tube have been arranged along with
rectangular winglet pair (RWP) in CFU configuration. Whereas in
Fig. 1(b), the tubes are arranged in a staggered manner but the

(a)

X (length in m)

(b)

X (length in m)

Fig. 8. Effect of different configurations on the distribution of combined span wise average Nusselt Number in a channel for Re = 1500.
 A. Sinha et al. / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 101 (2016) 667681 675

winglet orientation remains the same. But due to the staggered
configuration, both CFU and CFD strategies are encountered by
the flow field which would result in large inter-mixing and hence
better heat transfer.
Development of the flow fields at different cross-sections for
the in-line as well as the staggered cases are presented in Figs. 3
and 4. From the flow fields of the in-line sections, it is quite evident
from the centre point of the vortices that these does not have any
lateral movement and hence no interactions between these;
whereas as expected in the staggered case, there is very strong
interactions between the vortices. Moreover, both clockwise and
counter clockwise vortices are interacting thus the temperature
is more dispersed in the staggered arrays. The same can be visual-
ized from the temperature contours of different configurations in
Fig. 5. It may be noted that the average temperature (321.45 K)
at the exit of the staggered row heat exchanger with winglet is
the highest due to better intermixing (319.56 K for the inline). Sim-
ilar intermixing can also be seen in Fig. 6 from the velocity profiles
at the mid-plane for different cases with staggered and inline tube
rows, with and without winglets.
The formation of vortices at different sections of the staggered
case along the flow directions can be clearly seen from the Fig. 7.
At the entrance two counter rotating vortices are formed and these
are trying to lift the fluid between the winglet pair and the tube
away from the bottom wall thereby producing an up-wash region
(outflow). A downwash region is formed between the side surfaces
and vortex cores. This is due to the orientation of the winglets with
CFU strategy. Now further downstream these vortices interact with
the middle row of winglets arrange with CFD strategy. In this por-
tion the reverse of the flow patterns as observed in the first row
occur. A pair of counter rotating vortices is formed in between
the winglet pair and these try to force the fluid towards the bottom
wall. Again since the gap between the winglet pair is narrow in this
section, these counter rotating vortices interact with each other
towards their outer edges. The third row of winglet pair is again
similar to the first row. But in this portion due to the effect of
the second row, the rotational vortices are much more prominent
and apparently are much stronger when compared to the mean
streamwise velocity close to the longitudinal vortex core. The
streamwise development reveals that the secondary velocities
gradually become weaker away from the winglets due to the diffu-
sion caused by viscosity of the fluid.
Fig. 8 shows the effect of different configurations on the distri-
bution of combined span and time-wise average Nusselt number.

(a)

X (length in m)

(b)

X (length in m)

Fig. 9. Effect of different configurations on the distribution of area averaged streamwise components of vorticity in a channel for Re = 1500.
676 A. Sinha et al. / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 101 (2016) 667681

For the in-line rows of tube, the Nusselt number keeps on increas-
ing with decrease in angle of attack (increasing acute angle). But a
different scenario has been encountered with staggered row of
tubes. The Nusselt number distribution is almost similar with
angles of attack 165 and 160, which implies almost similar rate
of heat transfers between these two configurations. The same can
be corroborated with the streamwise components of Vorticity dis-
tribution in Fig. 9 for the staggered configuration.
Fig. 10 shows the average friction factors of different configura-
tions at Re = 1500. As expected it is clear that the staggered config-
urations have slightly more friction and hence more pressure drop
vis a vis the inline configurations. But again the friction factors for
angles of attack 165 and 160are almost identical and highest
among the others. Out of these two, the former has slightly more
friction instead of its higher angle of attack (lower acute angle).
For 170 angle of attack, the friction factor is quite low as expected.
This has resulted in quite interesting performance in terms of
quality factor for the staggered cases as shown in Fig. 11. Due to
the less friction with 170 angle of attack, this configuration has
better quality factor in comparison to the angle of attack 165.
But surprisingly the best quality factor is obtained for the angle
of attack of 160 due to its high Nusselt number and lower friction
factor. The inline cases behave as expected that is the heat transfer
performance increases with decrease in angle of attack (increasing
acute angle).
From the results obtained for cases with 160 and 165 angle of
attack, it seems that there may be an optimum angle of attack
between these two values for Re = 1500. So an angle of attack of
162.5 is chosen and its above parameters are compared with both
160 and 165 angle of attack cases. Figs. 1215 represent the aver-
age Nusselt number, streamwise Vorticity, average apparent fric-
tion factor and quality factor respectively. From these, it become
evident that the case with 162.5 angle of attack has better heat
transfer performance based on Nusselt number as well as it has
got lower apparent friction factor in comparison to the other two
cases. Therefore, this configuration has got the best performance
in terms of quality factor at Re = 1500.
In Fig. 16, the velocity contours in transverse section along the
longitudinal flow directions with Re = 1500 and angle of attack
165, 162.5 and 160 are plotted. It can be easily observed that
in the middle figure (with 162.5 angle of attack) the velocities
are higher in all the sections especially in and around the flow

(a)

X (length in m)

(b)

X (length in m)

Fig. 10. Effect of different configurations on the distribution of span wise average friction factor in a channel for Re = 1500.
 A. Sinha et al. / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 101 (2016) 667681 677

(a)

X (length in m)

(b)

X (length in m)

Fig. 11. Effect of different configurations on the distribution of quality factor in a channel for Re = 1500.

X (length in m)

Fig. 12. Effect of the three configurations on the distribution of combined span wise average Nusselt number in a channel for Re = 1500.
678 A. Sinha et al. / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 101 (2016) 667681

X (length in m)

Fig. 13. Effect of the three configurations on the distribution of area averaged streamwise components of vorticity in a channel for Re = 1500.

X (length in m)

Fig. 14. Effect of the three configurations on the distribution of span wise average friction factor in a channel for Re = 1500.

obstructions (winglets, tubes etc.) as compared to the other two. So
it can safely be inferred that at Re = 1500, this configuration pro-
duces less friction, higher velocities and hence better intermixing
which results in a better heat transfer performance.
Now further investigations are needed in order to show
whether this configuration is optimum for all practical Re applica-
ble for this type of heat exchangers. For this, several cases are run
with Re starting from 250 till 1500 for all the three configurations
and the results are shown in Fig. 17. On scrutiny of the results, it
transpires that the heat exchanger with 160 angle of attack is
the most efficient geometry till Re = 1375 beyond this the heat
exchanger with 162.5 angle of attack is the most efficient.
6. Conclusion
The present study has been carried out with the objective of
assessing the effects of the positions of the tubes and the relative
positions of the vortex generators on flow and heat transfer char-
acteristics in a representative periodic element of a fin-tube heat
exchanger. For this purpose, numerical investigations have been
performed in a channel with inline rows of tubes and staggered
rows of tubes with half the channel height rectangular winglet
pairs. The flow structures and heat transfer behaviors have been
examined at different cross-flow planes with the help of velocity
vectors, streamlines, temperature contours, vorticity and Nusselt
number distribution etc. The performance of the vortex generators
has been evaluated based on the comparison of Nusselt number,
friction factor, quality factor. The following concluding remarks
are drawn from the present investigation:
 During the channel flows, the swirling motions generated by
the vortex generators disrupt the thermal boundary layer,
intensify mixing and bring about enhancement of heat transfer
with relatively less pressure penalty.
 The fin surfaces are subjected to flow impingement; accelerated
and decelerated flow due to the presence of winglets. All these
effects cause differential local distribution of heat transfer on
the top and bottom channel walls.
 A. Sinha et al. / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 101 (2016) 667681 679

X (length in m)

Fig. 15. Effect of the three configurations on the distribution of quality factor in a channel for Re = 1500.

Fig. 16. Velocity contours in transverse section along the longitudinal flow directions with angle of attack (a) 165, (b) 162.5 & (c) 160 respectively for Re = 1500 (velocity
unit is in m/s).

 All the combinations are prone to pressure loss penalty which
amounts to enhanced friction factor as high as 1.53 times
the base inline case.
 For the heat exchangers with inline tubes and rectangular wing-
let pairs, the performance of the heat exchangers increases with
decrease in angle of attack (increasing acute angle) although
with a pressure penalty. This is irrespective of the Re applicable
for general purpose industrial heat exchangers (Re varying from
250 to 1500).
 For the heat exchangers with staggered row of tubes and rect-
angular winglet pairs, the performance depends on the configu-
ration as well as the Re. Therefore based on the Re for a
particular heat exchanger application, the optimum configura-
tion needs to be chosen.
680 A. Sinha et al. / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 101 (2016) 667681

(a)

Re

(b)

Re

(c)

Re
Fig. 17. Variations of (a) average combined Nusselt number, (b) average apparent friction factor & (c) average quality factor for different staggered configurations with Reynolds number.

Conflict of interest
There is no conflict of interest including any financial, personal
or other relationships with other people or organizations within
3 years of beginning the submitted work that could inappropri-
ately influence, or be perceived to influence, the work.
Acknowledgement
The authors gratefully acknowledge the High Performance
Computing Facility at Aerosystems Laboratory of CSIR-CMERI
for providing the necessary computing resources for this
work.
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