Summary

In this tutorial, periodic flow and heat transfer in a staggered tube bank were modeled in ANSYS FLUENT. The model was set up assuming a known mass flow through the tube bank and constant wall temperatures. Due to the periodic nature of the flow and symmetry of the geometry, only a small piece of the full geometry was modeled. In addition, the tube bank configuration lent itself to the use of a hybrid mesh with quadrilateral cells around the tubes and triangles elsewhere.

The Periodic Conditions dialog box makes it easy to run this type of model with a variety of operating conditions. For example, different flow rates (and hence different Reynolds numbers) can be studied, or a different inlet bulk temperature can be imposed. The resulting solution can then be examined to extract the pressure drop per tube row and overall Nusselt number for a range of Reynolds numbers.