Abstract
Intercooling and aftercooling are required in order to operate air compressor, these are conducted through air-cooled or water-cooled heat exchangers. This study aims to find more suitable type of heat exchanger as a water-cooled intercooler of air compressor. Comparative performance evaluation among fin-tube heat exchanger and shell-and-tube (S&T) heat exchanger having various tubes such as circular tube, spiral tube, and internally finned tube was conducted. Thermal-hydraulic performance of each heat exchanger type is evaluated in terms of temperature drop and pressure drop. The comparisons show that shell-and-tube heat exchangers may have similar and larger heat transfer capacity to the fin-tube heat exchanger if tube diameter is reduced and multiple pass is adopted. For these cases, however, compressed air pressure drop in shell-and-tube heat exchanger become much larger than that in fin-tube heat exchanger.