Heat transfer to or from a fluid flowing through a tube
R. Shankar Subramanian
A common situation encountered by the chemical engineer is heat transfer to fluid flowing
through a tube. This can occur in heat exchangers, boilers, condensers, evaporators, and a host
of other process equipment. Therefore, it is useful to know how to estimate heat transfer
coefficients in this situation.
We can classify the flow of a fluid in a straight circular tube into either laminar or turbulent flow.
It is assumed from hereon that we assume fully developed incompressible, Newtonian, steady
flow conditions. Fully developed flow implies that the tube is long compared with the entrance
length in which the velocity distribution at the inlet adjusts itself to the geometry and no longer
changes with distance along the tube.