A New Approach to Numerical Simulation of Small Sized Plate Heat Exchangers With Chevron Plates

Abstract

A numerical and experimental study of heat transfer and fluid flow in a single pass counter flow plate heat exchanger with chevron plates has been presented in this paper. CFD analysis of small sized plate heat exchanger was carried out by taking the complete geometry of the heat transfer surface and more realistic hydrodynamic and thermal boundary conditions. A cold channel with two chevron plates and two halves of hot channels on either side having flat periodic boundaries was selected as the computational domain. The numerical model was validated with data from experiments and empirical correlations from literature. Heat transfer and pressure drop data were obtained experimentally with water as the working fluid, in the Reynolds number range 400–1300 and the Prandtl number range 4.4–6.3.