Design analysis and performance evaluation of heat pipe embedded oil cooler with enhanced staggered fins

Abstract

Hydraulic coolers are most commonly preferred cooling source in industry. The progress in past few years have offered high efficiency and reliable hydraulic component, yet hydraulic cooling circuit design is often neglected part of development. One aspect of the hydraulic cooling circuit design is prevention of overheating hydraulic oil. Allowing oil temperature rise beyond particular limit can increase the power consumption and reduce the life of a system due to poor lubrication, higher internal leakage, higher risk of cavitation’s and damage component. Now-a-days shell and tube type oil coolers with water as the cooling medium are used as hydraulic oil cooler, these are extremely bulky and running cost is high hence it is needed to be replaced by another system that will be air cooled to make provision for lower space consumption and cost reduction. This paper discusses the design and development of innovative oil cooler heat extraction system using heat pipe. Designs of fins preferred are namely the straight fin system with fins projected outward in eight channels. The equipment developed is first model using Unigrafix Nx-8 and steady state thermal analysis of fins is done in Ansys workbench 16.0. A simple, compact, high efficiency, low cost device is developed, also a new technology of heat pipe embedded oil cooler is learnt in this present work. This paper discusses the performance of heat pipe embedded oil cooler in terms of LMTD, overall heat transfer coefficient and effectiveness. Further it discusses the performance evaluation of the straight fin setup.