Heat Transfer Characteristics of Plate Heat Exchanger with Bubble Fin Using Al<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub>/Water Nanofluid: Numerical Investigation
Sandeep Kumar, Sudhir Kumar Singh, Deepak Sharma
Abstract
Plate heat exchangers (PHEs) are extensively used in energy transfer applications for their higher effectiveness and compact structure. Due to high pressure drop in corrugated PHEs, the situation appeared for modification in design of PHE. In the present study, the heat transfer performance of flat plate heat exchanger, bubble fin PHE and optimized bubble finned PHE are studied numerically using Al2O3/water nanofluid. The effect of mass flow rate and volume fraction on heat transfer coefficient (HTC), Nusselt number and pressure drop are investigated. Numerical simulations have been performed considering Reynolds number in between 600 and 2,000 under single-phase fluid flow. An enhancement of 15% and 107% in HTC and Nusselt number, respectively, is obtained for the finned PHE as compared to no-fin configuration. A maximum enhancement of 18% in Nusselt number has been obtained for Al2O3/water nanofluid as compared to base fluid. HTC increased with an increase in mass flow rate and volume concentration of nanofluid. The pressure drop in bubble fined heat exchanger is lower than corrugated PHEs. The pressure drop and pumping power increase with an increase in volume concentration.