Convective heat and mass transfer in wavy finned-tube exchangers

The paper adopts a simplified two-dimensional approach to deal with convective heat and mass transfer in laminar flows of humid air through wavy finned-tube exchangers. The computational domain is spatially periodic, with fully developed conditions prevailing at a certain distance from the inlet section. Both the entrance and the fully developed flow region are investigated In the fully developed region, periodicities in the flow, temperature and mass concentration fields are taken into account. The approach is completely general, even if the finite element method is used for the discretizations. In the application section, velocity, temperature, and mass concentration fields are computed first. Then apparent friction factors, Nusselt numbers, Colburn factors for heat and mass transfer, and goodness factors are evaluated both in the entrance and in the fully developed region.