“FIN DESIGN OF AIR COOLED HEAT EXCHANGER USED IN ROTARY SCREW COMPRESSOR”

Abstract

The performance of any compressor is depends on many parameter like pressure, temperature
and application of compressor, The efficiency of compressor is mainly depends on heat generation and
heat rejection from system, there are variety of heat exchanger used for heat removal like water cooler, air
cooler, plate and bar, shell and tube etc. the present work is aim to focus on air-cooled performance
enhancement via fin design. The fin is one of the critical components of heat transfer proper design and
location of fin on heat exchanger can improve a performance lots. The aim of work is to improve the heat
exchange rate of current cooler without changing the parameters like air flow, air velocity. The variety of
fin like plain fin, circular fin, herringbone etc. will be verified against geometrical arrangement like
circular pitch, rectangular pitch, triangle pitch for performance enhancement and same can be variey with
help of CFD. The new cooler fin design was suggested based on the Computational analysis of cooler
which was indicating a circular fin with Al as a fin material will give us a better heat rejection and lower
pressure drop for cooling air flow. The cooler sample model of cooler was manufactured with help of heat
exchanger manufacturer and the cooler performance was measured in industrial test setup having wind
tunnel the setup is having all the facilities to measure Velocity, temperature and pressure drop across the
wind tunnel also the ambient air temperature can be vary with help of submerge heater and oil tank which
can be precisely measured and controlled. The latter stage of work shows the comparisons of both results
and we have observed the gap of near about 7.875 % in both results which is far enough to accept as per
literature review, the gap analysis was carried out to identify why the gap was observed in both case.