Experimental study and prediction of pressure drop and heat transfer in shell-side of tube-and-shell heat exchangers

Performances of heat transfer and pressure drop through shell-side in three types of shell-and-tube heat exchangers, of which one with conventional segmental baffles and the other two with continuous helical baffles, were experimentally carried out with water flowing in tube-side and oil flowing in shell-side. Genetic algorithm was used to predict heat transfer performances based on searching constants of correlations under limited experimental data. The experimental results show that under the same flow rate in shell-side, the heat exchangers with continuous helical baffles offer higher total pressure drop and heat transfer coefficient than that of heat exchanger with segmental baffles, especially increase with the increase of fluid flow rate. The predicted heat transfer rates based on correlations, of which their constants determined by means of genetic algorithms, enable the closer fit to experimental data than those by regression analysis in the reference, indicating that genetic algorithm may be recommended to predict performance of heat exchange devices in engineering application.