CT-21 Tubeside Condensation Heat Transfer with Desuperheating - Pure Components
Characterizing a desuperheating process condenser requires appropriate correlations to determine the heat duty in each zone. In the desuperheating zone, superheat is removed and the vapor temperature is reduced to that of the saturation temperature. In the condensing zone, latent heat is removed as the vapor changes into the liquid state. Using tube wall temperature as a criterion, HTRI methods for calculating the desuperheating heat transfer in HTRI Xchanger Suite® 5.0 are divided into two parts: dry-wall desuperheating and wet-wall desuperheating. To evaluate the accuracy of these methods, we collected horizontal intube condensation data for superheated n-pentane vapor. The superheat temperature ranged from a few degrees up to 105 °C, and the heat transfer process covered the range of dry-wall desuperheating, wet-wall desuperheating, and condensing. We compared these new experimental data with heat transfer predictions from several selected literature methods and with the current HTRI method for condensation of superheated pure components; we also developed a new method for wet-wall desuperheating using the Nusselt theoretical base. This report presents the new experimental data and summarizes the method evaluation and improvement for tubeside condensation of superheated pure component vapors.