Impact of plate design on the performance of welded type plate heat exchangers for sorption cycles

Numerical and experimental analysis was carried out to examine the heat transfer and pressure drop characteristics of welded type plate heat exchangers for absorption application using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) technique. The simulation results based on CFD are compared with experimental results. A commercial CFD software package (FLUENT) has been used to predict the characteristics of heat transfer, pressure drop and flow distribution within the plate heat exchangers. In this paper, a welded plate heat exchanger with a plate of chevron embossing type was tested by controlling mass flow rate, solution concentration, and inlet/outlet temperatures. The working fluid is H₂O/LiBr solution with the LiBr concentration of 54-62% in mass. The numerical simulation examines the internal flow patterns, temperature distribution and the pressure distribution within the channel of the plate heat exchanger. Three plates of embossing types; chevron embossing, elliptic and round, are proposed and simulated in this paper. The simulation results show reasonably good agreement with the experimental results. Also, the numerical results show that the plate with the elliptical shape gives better performance than the plate of the chevron shape from the viewpoints of heat transfer and pressure drop.