Abstract
This study conducts a simplified computer simulation about a shell-and-tube heat exchanger. A nuclear power plant has many different complicated heat exchangers, for example, the Residual Heat Removal system heat exchanger. Unfortunately, the size of these nuclear power plant heat exchangers is usually huge and with very complicated design. As we conduct a computer simulation as these one heat exchangers by computer, we often use a lot of computer resources, and spend much time. Therefore, we develop a simplified simulation. It not only can achieve the same objective, but also can significantly use less resources and time to simulate. Indeed, we demonstrate that this simplified simulation can significantly use less time than the full-scale simulation to achieve the same results employing the same computer. The essence of this research is the simplified computer simulation. We build two independent models of a single U-tube and a porous heat exchanger and develop five User Defined Function programs (UDF) to make two models communicate with each other. The simulation is conducted using CFD_FLUENT. According to the U-tube (tube-side) situation, this simplified computer simulation can apply a source distribution to the porous heat exchanger (shell-side). After testing simulation through reasonable comparison with full-scale simulation, we employ it to study the heat exchanger effectiveness. The simulation results reveal that the heat exchanger effectiveness significantly increases with increase the inlet temperature of tube side and has different tendencies with iii different tube side or shell side flow rate.