FRTCOILS: A General Purpose Simulation Software for Design and Prediction of Thermal and Hydraulic Performance of Finned-Tube Compact Heat Exchangers

This paper presents computer software developed for rating and optimum selection of finned circular tubes compact heat exchangers with various coil geometries. The software is developed to use as a computing tool for commercial and R&D purposes in FRITERM A.S, an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) of finned tube heat exchangers. Finned-tube heat exchangers are highly utilized in refrigeration and process industries and heat transfer and pressure drop calculations are very important to manufactures and design engineers. For this purpose, a simulation and design software to predict the performance of finned-tube heat exchangers is presented. In finned-tube coils fin side fluid is air and tube side fluid can be water, oil, glycol water solution mixture and refrigerants. The analysis and rating of coils at dry and wet operating conditions are presented. Design and the most suitable selections of coils at the given parameters and design constraints from many different coil geometries are also performed in the software. User-friendly object-oriented programming C# is applied in developing the software. The software is developed in modular basic. Six modules are developed: Heating Coils, Cooling Coils, Condenser Coils, Steam Coils, Heat Recovery Coils and Evaporator (DX) Coils. REFPROP is also integrated in the software and all fluids’ thermal and transport properties are obtained from REFPROP. Heat transfer and pressure drop correlations available from literature are evaluated with recommendations. Simulated results are verified against experimental results.Copyright © 2007 by ASME