Chemical & Process Technology: CFD in Compact Heat Exchanger

Monday, July 2, 2007

CFD in Compact Heat Exchanger

Computatinal Fluid Dynamic (CFD) has been widely used to investigate flow dynamic, performance, effciency, proper separation, etc in Oil & Gas, Refinery, Petrochemical, Chemical and food industry. One of the application is Compact Heat Exchanger Design. The following article has presented use of CFD in Compact Heat Exchanger Design...Enjoy reading...

Designing Novel Compact Heat Exchangers For Improved Efficiency Using CFD

CFD code has been used to study and optimize the design of a plate Heat Exchanger comprising of corrugated walls with herringbone design. Due to the difficulties induced by the geometry and flow complexity, an approach through a simplified model was followed as a first step. This simple model, comprised of only one corrugated plate and a flat plate, was constructed and simulated. The Reynolds numbers examined are 400, 900, 1000, 1150, 1250 and 1400. The SST turbulence model was preferred over other flow models for the simulation. The case where hot water (60 C) is in contact with a constant-temperature wall (20 C) was also simulated and the heat transfer rate was calculated. The results for the simplified model, presented in terms of velocity, shear stress and heat transfer coefficients, strongly encourage the simulation of one channel of the typical plate heat exchanger, i.e. the one that comprises of two corrugated plates with herringbone design having their crests nearly in contact. Preliminary results of this latter work, currently in progress, comply with visual observations.
Athanasios G. Kanaris, Katerina A. Mouza, Spiros V. Paras, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Further reading