Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow Analysis in a Corrugated Plate Heat Exchanger

Abstract

The corrugated plate heat exchangers have some significant benefits over orthodox heat exchangers due to easy maintenance and assembly-disassembly capability. This type of heat exchanger usually focuses on improving geometry by increasing the surface area in a heat exchanger and the heat transfer rate from plate to fluid. It works in an efficient manner for both single-phase and two-phase flow. In this study, the performance of a modified corrugated plate heat exchanger was studied numerically using ANSYS- Fluent 20R1. A transient, pressure-based model was selected for the analysis. For the turbulence model, k-ω SST was chosen. A nanofluid, base fluid of water containing nanoparticles of a metallic oxide (Al2O3) was used to enhance thermal conductivity. A wide range was taken in account with regard to Reynolds numbers (1000-12000). The effects of nanofluid on Nusselt number and Heat transfer coefficient were studied for the volume fraction of 0.2-2. The temperature distribution at different volume fractions inside the heat exchanger was also studied. At the hot outlet, temperature increases; at the cold outlet, temperature decreases with the increase in Reynolds number. Although the heat transfer coefficient was increased with the increase of volume fraction of Al2O3 while the surface Nusselt number decreased with the increase of volume fraction. The lowest heat transfer coefficient was found to be 12605.46 W/m2K for volume fraction 0.2 and the highest heat transfer coefficient was found to be 13017.43 W/m2K for the volume fraction 2.0. On the other hand, for the surface Nusselt number, the maximum value was found to be 199.5 for volume fraction 0.2 and the minimum value was found to be 122.16 for volume fraction 2.0.