Cfd simulations of chevron type plate heat exchangers and validation with experimental data

The design of plate heat exchangers (HEX) which have been used since 1930's in food industry, was developed in 1960's with the help of new geometries and the developments related to new materials; and the utilization of plate heat exchangers increased. Today, they are used in several applications such as electronic circuits, HVAC applications, and chemical industries on account of their compactness, high efficiency, flexible design and easy maintenance. The heat transfer calculations of plate heat exchangers compose a wide area of research because of its complex geometry and many design parameters. Hence, it is necessary to develop correlations for heat transfer and pressure drop analysis. For different plate types, experiments for hydraulic and thermal performance analysis have to be performed in order to develop plate-dependent correlations for Nusselt number and friction factor, which are used in hydraulic and thermal calculations. These experiments, however, are quite expensive and limited. For this reason, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) can be a powerful tool for performance analysis of plate heat exchangers. It can provide almost realistic visualization of flow zone by zone and by allowing immense fluid library it can also provide wide range of study possibilities so as to predict parameters such as temperature, pressure and velocity in heat exchanger whereas experiments cannot. The main goal of this study is to perform CFD analysis to determine thermal performance of real-sized entire plate heat exchangers and validate the results with previously obtained experimental data and determine the effects of distributing channels and corrugated structure on thermal – hydraulic performance of plate heat exchanger. Temperature, pressure and velocity distribution on each plate, and friction factor and Nusselt number are obtained from the CFD simulations and are compared with the experimental results. These results indicate that thermal hydraulic analysis of a commercial HEX by CFD is in line with the obtained experimental data.