Performance enhancement of water bath heater at natural gas city gate station using twisted tubes

Natural gas is transported from producing regions to consumption regions by using transmission pipelines at high pressures. At consumption regions, the pressure of natural gas is reduced in city gate stations(CGSs). Before the pressure reduction process, the temperature of natural gas is increased usually by using a water bath heater,which burns natural gas as fuel, to protect against freezing of natural gas. These types of heat exchangers have a low efficiency and consume a lot of fuel to generate the required heat. In the current study, the twisted configuration of the heating coil is proposed and investigated to enhance the heat transfer through a water bath heater with a nominal capacity of 1000 m~3·h-1. Firstly, the implementation procedure is validated with data collected from the CGS of Qaleh-Jiq(located in Golestan province of Iran). A very good agreement is achieved between the obtained results and the real data. Then, three different twist ratios are considered to examine the twisting effects. The proposed technique is evaluated in the terms of velocity, temperature, and pressure variations, and the results are compared with the conventional case, i.e. straight configuration. It is found that both the heat transfer rate and the pressure drop augment as the twist ratio is raised. Finally, it is concluded that the twisted tubes can reduce the length of the gas coil by about 12.5% for the model with low twist ratio, 18.75% for the model with medium twist ratio, and 25% for the model with high twist ratio as compared to the straight configuration.