Performance of pure crossflow heat exchanger in sensible heat transfer application

Abstract

All process industries involve the usage of heat exchanger equipment and understanding its performance during the design phase is very essential. The present research work specifies the performance of a pure cross flow heat exchanger in terms of dimensionless factors such as number of transfer units, capacity rate ratio, and heat exchanger effectiveness. Steady state sensible heat transfer was considered in the analysis. The matrix approach that was established in the earlier work was used in the study. The results were depicted in the form of charts, tables, and performance equations. It was observed that indeterminately increasing the number of transfer units past a threshold limit provided very marginal improvement in the performance of a pure cross flow heat exchanger. Likewise, flow pattern in a heat exchanger is usually assumed either as mixed or un-mixed. However, due to various operating conditions, partially mixed conditions do exist. This work considers partially mixed conditions in the tube side of the heat exchanger. The correction factor for heat exchanger effectiveness was developed to accommodate partially mixed flow conditions in the pure cross flow heat exchanger.