ARTICLE:

• ADVANCES IN NUMERICAL ANALYSIS OF FLUID FLOW, HEAT TRANSFER AND FLOW FRICTION CHARACTERISTICS OF COMPACT HEAT EXCHANGER SURFACES  download article

Ramesh K. Shah
University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA

Morgan R. Heikal
School of Environment and Technology, Faculty of Science and Engineering, The University of Brighton, Cockcroft Building, Lewes Road, Brighton BN2 4GJ, United Kingdom

Bernard Thonon
CEA-Grenoble/DTP/GRETH, Grenoble, France

ABSTRACT

The objective of this paper is to provide a comprehensive state-of-the-art review of numerical studies of single-phase flow, heat transfer and flow friction characteristics of compact heat exchanger surfaces; and where experimental data are available, provide specific comparisons to verify the accuracy of numerical work. The surfaces include offset strip and louver fins used in plate-fin exchangers, wavy fins used in tube-fin exchangers, and chevron(stamped)plates used in plate heat exchangers. Flows in compact heat exchanger surfaces are dominated by swirl or flow separation, recirculation and reattachment. In addition, unsteady laminar or low Reynolds number turbulent flows are generally encountered in the wake regions of surface interruptions. Such flows are difficult to analyze numerically with a high degree of accuracy because of the lack of accurate low Reynolds number turbulence models. This is the reason for the very slow progress of numerically analyzing compact heat exchanger surfaces. The body of the paper covers numerical work reported in the literature on the CHE surfaces. For each surface, the numerical analysis is described in sufficient details, and comparisons are made with experimentation where available.

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