Experimental investigation of the thermal performance effects of turbulators with different fin angles in a circular pipe

In this study, we experimentally investigated the heat transmission and friction effects of finned turbulators with different angles in a circular pipe for single-phase flows. Experiments were conducted to see how turbulators affected the friction factor and Nusselt number. The Nusselt numbers of the finned turbulators with 30°, 20° and 10° angles rose by 121.66%, 109.05% and 81.30%, respectively, in comparison to the plain pipe, according to experiments using Reynolds numbers in the range of 10043-14386. The overall heat transfer improvement of all turbulator types appears to be more than one. Due to the increase in blade angle, the highest Nu number was obtained from the experiment with a 30° angle fin turbulator, but the greatest heat transfer improvement was obtained as 1.476 in a 20° angle blade turbulator for Re = 10043 number. The thermal improvement factors of 20° and 30° angle fin turbulators were found to be 1.1 and 1.07 times more than, respectively, compared to the turbulator with a 10° angle. In addition, it has been shown that the 20° angle fin turbulator's thermal improvement factor is 1.03 times higher than the 30° angle turbulator's. © 2022 Elsevier Masson SAS