Design, Fabrication and Numerical Investigation of Multi- Louvered Compact Plate Fin Heat Exchanger

Heat exchanger is a thrust area, which required constant improvement in the performance. Recently multi-louvered plate fin heat exchangers, a kind of compact heat exchanger, have been the subject of vast research. Multi-louvered plate heat exchanger has unique advantage, in that it is easy to control fluid temperature beside the general peculiarity of compact heat exchanger; so a large number multi-louvered plate fin heat exchanger, especially plate fin heat exchanger, are used in chemical industry. In the present study, successively increased or decreased louver angle patterns are proposed and 3-D numerical analysis on heat and fluid flow are carried out. A steady-state three-dimensional numerical model was used to study the heat transfer and pressure drop characteristics of a multi-louvered compact plate fin heat exchanger. Air was the heat transfer medium, and the Reynolds number ranged from 200 to 1600. A numerical study was performed on compact fin-and-tube heat exchangers having circular tube with multilouvered fins. Air side performance for heat exchanger with and without hydrophilic coating has been studied. The pressure drops for the hydrophilic coated surface were lower than the corresponding un-coated surfaces. The heat transfer performance for the hydrophilic coating surface was found to be lower than the corresponding un-coated surface tested at the same condition. Moreover, the increase in the heat transfer performance was found to be 20% for louver angle 26º, fin pitches of 1.2 mm with hydrophilic coating. The effects of number of tube rows, fin pitch and louver angle on airside performance were analyzed.