Analysis for heat transfer enhancement of helical and electrical heating tube heat exchangers in vacuum freeze-drying plant

This paper investigates the heat transfer rate of the combined cooling-and-heating heat exchanger by using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method. Several factors, such as additional baffles and heat transfer areas, are also discussed in order to improve the efficiency of heat exchanger in the vacuum freeze-drying system. The simulated result indicated that, for addition electrical heating tube, the heat transfer rate of the heat exchanger increased with the increasing length of the electrical heating tube. The increasing rates of secondary and primary drying stages were 2.774 and 2.986 W/mm, respectively. For additional vertical baffle, the variation of the heat transfer rate with respect to vertical baffle length was in the U-shape format. The minimum heat transfer rates of secondary drying, primary drying and freezing stages were 716.79 W and − 195.17 W and − 670.71 W, respectively. For additional W-shape vertical baffles, the heat transfer rate of this heat exchanger was maximum among these four designs. For the three stages of heat exchangers with these four designs, the shell side Nusselt number had the inverse linear relationship with the Reynolds number.