Improved thermal performance of a hydronic radiant panel heating system by the optimization of tube shapes

The thermal performance enhancement of the hydronic radiant floor heating system by tube shape refinements is investigated in this paper.Both analytical and detailed numerical modelings are carried out to predict the performance of the radiant system.While the simple analytical model briefly investigates the possibility of the effect of the tube shape improvement with the parametric analysis,the commercial computational fluid dynamics(CFD) code(Ansys/CFX) is used to perform the detailed 3D analysis under different tube shape conditions.The fin thickness,the number of fins,and the tube thermal conductivity turn out to have significant effects on the radiant system performance.The potential energy saving impacts of the tube shape refinements are also discussed.The tube shape improvement turns out to increase the floor surface temperature and to decrease the hot water temperature drop across the system,resulting in heating energy savings.