The flow and the heat transfer about the cross-flow fin-tube heat exchanger in an out-door unit of a heat pump system has been numerically investigated. Using the general purpose analysis code, FLUENT, the Navier-Stokes equations and the energy equation are solved for the three dimensional computation domain that encompasses multiple rows of the fin-tube. The temperature on the fin and tube surface is assumed constant but compensated later through the fin efficiency when predicting the heat-transfer rate. The contact resistance is also taken into consideration.
The flow and temperature fields for a wide range of inlet velocity and fin-tube arrangements are examined and the results are presented in the thesis. The details of the flow are very well captured and the heat transfer rate for a range of inlet velocity is in excellent agreement with the measured data. The flow solution provides the effective permeability and the inertial resistance factor of the heat exchanger if the exchanger were to be approximated by the porous medium. This information is essential in carrying out the global flow field calculation which, in turn, provides the inlet velocity for the microscopic temperature-field calculation of the heat exchanger unit.
