Experimental performance analysis of gasketed-plate heat exchangers

Decreasing the energy losses to minimum and working with the maximum efficiencies have become the first priority in engineering applications. Hence, researches are done to increase heat transfer. In consequence of these researches designs, shapes and efficiencies of heat exchangers which are used in heat transfer applications are renewed and developed day by day. As a result of these progresses, plate heat exchangers are emerged and become widespread and replace other types of heat exchangers. This thesis is about thermal and hydrodynamic performance analysis of gasketed-plate heat exchangers. This thesis includes the design and setting up of a gasketed plate heat exchanger test set-up, where thermal and hydrodynamic experimental analysis of gasketed plate heat exchangers are done. Hence, a set-up is constructed at the TOBB University of Economics and Technology Mechanical Engineering Labrotory and experiments are done for industrial type chevron plate heat exchangers under different conditions by using this set-up. Experiments are performed for a wide range of Reynolds numbers between 450 and 5250. To investigate the thermal and hydrodynamic characteristics of heat exchangers, measurements of temperatures at the inlets and outlets, measurments of volumetric flow rates for both hot and cold fluids, and measurements of pressure drops between inlet and outlet ports are done. As a result of these analysis specific Nusselt number correlations for heat transfer analysis and friction factor correlations for pressure drop calculations are found for each plate tested as a function of Reynolds number. The obtained results are compared with each other and with some of the existants correlations in the literature. The new correlations show similar trends with the correlations in the literature.