TY - JOUR N2 - Most of the formulations regarding the characteristics of a shell and tube heat exchanger have a common assumption; namely that the baffle plates are equidistant. This assumption fails to cater the real world scenario for defective baffles as the alteration in a shell and tube heat exchanger invalidates the equidistant baffle spacing of the plates. In this regard, a small six baffles heat exchanger was modeled in the computational fluid dynamics software package and studied by removing each baffle plate one at a time. Effect of removing each baffle plate on the temperature, pressure, heat transfer coefficient, and total heat transfer rate was recorded. It was observed that variation in the pressure drop for the same number of baffle plates varies along the axial order of the plates. The change in pressure drop due to the removal of the baffle plate near the inlet and the outlet was lowest and reaches a maximum in the axial center. It was also found that the plates below the radial center contribute higher towards the overall heat transfer as compared to those above. L1 - http://journals.pan.pl/Content/116759/PDF/10_paper.pdf L2 - http://journals.pan.pl/Content/116759 PY - 2020 IS - No 2 EP - 221 DO - 10.24425/ather.2020.133629 KW - Thermal distribution KW - Baffle spacing KW - Heat exchanger KW - Turbulence modeling KW - CFD study A1 - Aziz, Abdullah A1 - Rehman, Shafique PB - The Committee of Thermodynamics and Combustion of the Polish Academy of Sciences and The Institute of Fluid-Flow Machinery Polish Academy of Sciences VL - vol. 41 DA - 2020.06.25 T1 - Analysis of non-equidistant baffle spacing in a small shell and tube heat exchanger SP - 201 UR - http://journals.pan.pl/dlibra/publication/edition/116759 T2 - Archives of Thermodynamics ER -