Heat transfer and performance enhancement investigation of novel plate heat exchanger

Abstract

In this paper, the enhancement of heat transfer and performance have been investigated numerically for a novel plate heat exchanger. The effect of changing the shape of the hyperbolic tangent function and the dimensions of the plate profile on the flow properties have been studied numerically by ANSYS Fluent 16.0. The results show that the transverse disturbances of fluid movement increase the heat transfer, as the heat transfer is enhanced by increasing the concavity of the hyperbolic tangent function. Moreover, as the corrugation depth of the plate increases, the heat transfer increases. As a result, it was found that the effect of the longitudinal turbulence in the direction of flow on the heat transfer is greater than the effect of the transverse turbulence. By comparing the results with those of the novel plate heat exchanger, it was shown that the heat transfer and performance have been enhanced on average by 13% and 8%, respectively when using the hyperbolic tangent function “y = tanh(x)”, while they have been enhanced on average by 52% and 36% respectively at the corrugation depth of 2.5 mm. Further, when comparing the enhanced performance of the novel plate heat exchanger with those of other plate geometries, the enhanced performance showed an improvement of up to 37% over its nearest competitor. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd