Thermo-hydraulic performance of zigzag, wavy, and serpentine channel based PCHEs

Abstract

Printed Circuit Heat Exchanger (PCHE) is a plate type compact heat exchanger that usually finds application in high pressure systems. The scope of the present work is restricted to two high pressure applications, viz. (i) Test Blanket Module (TBM) cooling circuit in International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) and (ii) Intermediate Heat exchangers (IHX) in Very High Temperature Reactors (VHTR). A counter flow PCHE, made of Alloy-617, working in He–He circuit has been considered as the reference for numerical simulations performed on ANSYS Fluent 13. A reduced model for single banked straight channel PCHE model has been proposed and is validated with literature [1]. The scientific and engineering aspects of flow and heat transfer characteristics in straight channel PCHE have been carefully examined for constant as well as varying thermo-physical properties and are compared with each other. Three different channel configurations viz. zigzag, sinusoidal and swept-zigzag (trapezoidal) have been numerically modeled and tested in a single banked PCHE core and the respective thermo-hydraulic performances are compared with straight channel PCHEs.