Investigation of thermal and hydraulic characteristics and flow maldistribution for chevron type gasketed-plate heat exchangers

Heat exchangers are one of the the most important elements that have been used for energy conversion systems since the begining of the history of thechnology. They provide enery transfer, in the form of heat, between two or more fluid having different temperatures. Heat exchangers have a wide range of application area within the cooling and heating systems; used in many fields from large-scale systems like air conditioning systems, waste heat recovery, nuclear reactors, power plants, chemical, agriculture, food and textile industries, and micro-scale systems such as electronics cooling. Thus, an experimental set-up, that has been established in TOBB ETU, is used for determining thermal-hydraulic performances and flow maldistribution of three different chevron type gasketed-plate heat exchangers having different geometries for various temperatures, number of plates and flow rates. Experiments are conducted within the range of Reynolds number 300 to 5000 and Prandtl number, 2.3 to 6.4. It is determined that, within the capacity of experimental set-up, maximum Reynolds number that can be reached is about 5000. Correlations for both hydraulic and thermal characteristics for three different chevron type gasketed-plate heat exchanger have been developed. In addition, flow mal-distribution depending on number of plates is investigated.