A study on heat transfer characteristics for staggered tube banks in cross-flow

Cross-flow over tube banks is commonly encountered in practice in heat transfer equipments. The local and average heat transfer characteristics for staggered tube banks are investigated in the present study. A naphthalene sublimation technique is employed to obtain the local heat transfer coefficients, and experiments are performed for various tube spacings, tube locations and Reynolds numbers. The variation of the local heat transfer coefficients is quite different from the first tube to the third tube, but they are similar afterwards. The average Nusselt number increases more than 30% and 65% on the second and third tubes, respectively, in comparison with that of the first tube. And the empirical correlations for average heat transfer coefficients are compared with the conventional heat transfer correlations.