1. Introduction
It is confirmed that in internal combustion engines (ICEs), more than 30–40% of fuel energy wastes from the exhaust and just 12–25% of the fuel energy converts to useful work [1] and [2]. On the other hand, statistics show that producing amounts of the internal combustion engines growth very fast and the concern of increasing the harmful greenhouse gases (GHG) will be appeared. So, researchers are motivated to by using the ways, recover the heat from the waste sources in engines which not only reduces the demand of fossil fuels, but also reduce the GHG and help to energy saving [3] and [4]. On the other hand, because exhaust heat exchanger may makes a pressure drop and effects on the engine performance, its design has very importance. To select an appropriate heat exchanger design limitations for each heat exchanger type firstly should be considered. Though production cost is often the primary limitation, several other selection aspects such as temperature ranges, pressure limits, thermal performance, pressure drop, fluid flow capacity, clean-ability, maintenance, materials, etc. are important. One of the most effective method to increase heat transfer is using the fins which widely used by the researchers [5], [6], [7], [8] and [9]. Some of the special HEXs designs to recover the exhaust heat are introduced in the following.
Recently, Ghazikhani et al. [10] estimated in an experimental work that brake specific fuel consumption (BSFC) of the diesel engine could be improved approximately 10% in different load and speeds of an OM314 diesel engine by using the recovered exergy from a simple double pipe heat exchanger in exhaust. Pandiyarajan et al. [11] designed a finned-tube heat exchanger and they used a thermal energy storage using cylindrical phase change material (PCM) capsules and found that nearly 10–15% of fuel power is stored as heat in the combined storage system in different loads. In another experimental work, Lee and Bae [12] designed a little heat exchanger with fins in the exhaust by design of experiment (DOE) technique. They reported that fins should be in the exhaust gases passage for more heat transfer and designed 18 cases in different fins numbers and thicknesses and found the most effective cases. Zhang et al. [13] modeled a finned tube evaporator heat exchanger for an ORC cycle. They concluded that waste-heat recovery efficiency is between 60% and 70% for most of the engine’s operating region also they mentioned that heat transfer area for a finned tube evaporator should be selected carefully based on the engine’s most typical operating region. Recently, Hossain and Bari [14] and [15] used a new HEX for heat recovery in a diesel engine experimentally and numerically. They applied SST k–ω for their modeling and they optimized the working fluid pressure and the orientation of heat exchangers and found the additional power increased from 16% to 23.7%.
This paper aims to model the heat transfer through exhaust gases to a cold fluid with modeling the fins with suitable viscous model to calculate the heat recovery amount. Two cases of previous experimental work are selected and numerical results are compared with experimental outcomes. Also, effect of fins size and engine load and speed on heat recovery is examined graphically.