Condensation of the air-steam mixture in a vertical tube condenser

Czech Technical University in Prague, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Department of Energy Engineering, Technická 4, 16607 Prague 6, Czech Republic

^a Corresponding author: jan.havlik@fs.cvut.cz

Published online: 28 March 2016

Abstract

This paper deals with the condensation of water vapour in the presence of non-condensable air. Experimental and theoretical solutions of this problem are presented here. A heat exchanger for the condensation of industrial waste steam containing infiltrated air was designed. The condenser consists of a bundle of vertical tubes in which the steam condenses as it flows downwards with cooling water flowing outside the tubes in the opposite direction. Experiments with pure steam and with mixtures of steam with added air were carried out to find the dependence of the condensation heat transfer coefficient (HTC) on the air concentration in the steam mixture. The experimental results were compared with the theoretical formulas describing the cases. The theoretical determination of the HTC is based on the Nusselt model of steam condensation on a vertical wall, where the analogy of heat and mass transfer is used to take into account the behaviour of air in a steam mixture during the condensation process. The resulting dependencies obtained from the experiments and obtained from the theoretical model have similar results. The significant decrease in the condensation HTC, which begins at very low air concentrations in a steam mixture, was confirmed.