Uneven heat and gravity load easily cause the deformation of finned tube bundle in aircooled condensers

leading to poor heat transfer balance among tubes.Taking two adjacent fin tubes as the research object

the Fluent software was employed to simulate the flow and heat transfer situation of the deformed tubes with spacing of 58mm.The calculation results showed that

after the tube bundle deformation

the tube spacing was increased;the air speed in no fin area between two tubes was the maximum

and was dramatically higher than that in fin area;the outlet air temperature was significantly lower than that before the tube deformation;the air temperature increase dropped

seriously affecting the heat transfer balance between tube bundles.Thus

the aluminum sheet was adopted to plug the clearance at inlet or outlet of deformed tubes.The results showed that

this countermeasure can improve the flow and heat transfer situation of tube bundles significantly.Furthermore

plugging at inlet of the deformed tubes can obtain better effects.