Temperature Distribution in Mini Channel Heat Exchanger for the Development of a Portable Vaccine Carrier

Abstract

Vaccine transport is of major importance in today's generation where there is a rapid population increase in the Philippines and it is most concerned in remote places where there is little or no available regular health support. Millions of Philippine pesos were lost due to the damages of vaccine materials being transported at unsuitable level of temperature. The idea of a portable vaccine kit is the best solution to this problem. The design of mini channel heat exchangers has attracted lots of attention in its application to localized heating and cooling system for miniature devices such as portable vaccine kit. The purpose of this study is to determine and simulate the temperature distribution of mini channel heat exchanger used as evaporator of a mini vaccine carrier kit. Experiments were conducted using mini channel heat exchangers of channel hydraulic diameters of 3.0mm. The total length for each channel is 640.0mm. The dimension of the mini channel heat exchanger is 100mm x 50mm x 20mm and the outside surfaces were machined to contain the needed fins. The mini channel heat exchanger is connected to a standard vapor compression refrigeration system. During each run of the experiment, the mini channel heat exchanger was placed inside a fabricated small wind tunnel where controlled flow of air from a forced draft fan was introduced for the cooling process. The experimental set-up of this study used data acquisition software and computer-aided simulation software. The software was used to simulate the temperature distribution of the evaporator before and after the experiment. The trend of the temperature distribution of refrigerant inside the mini channel heat exchanger is increasing. It was observed that the mini channel heat exchanger has a greater temperature drop compared to the temperature requirement of the portable vaccine carrier kit.