Abstract
As a result of the wide use of tubular heat exchangers in industry and considering the main heat transfer and friction limitations they possess compared to new technologies, heat transfer promoters of different shapes have appeared in recent years to improve their thermohydraulic performance. To date, there are many different promoter geometries each with its heat transfer and friction performance. This situation makes the selection of the right promoter for retrofit applications a complex task. To overcome this situation, this paper provides a performance mapping plot for the identification of the best promoter geometries out of the many available. This work demonstrates that it is possible to identify the promoters that best perform out of the many geometries available in applications at low and high-pressure drops. To this end, an arbitrarily selected group of different turbulence promoters are compared in terms of measurable parameters such as heat load and pressure drop. Besides, the results are confirmed using thermal and pressure drop irreversibility analysis. Different selection criteria can be applied based on the allowable pressure drop. In the case of retrofit, the best performance is identified by increased heat load for the same installed area with the lowest increment on pressure drop compared to the base case.
