A New Method for Producing Perforated Plate Recuperators

Abstract

Perforated plate heat exchangers, consisting of a series of parallel, high thermal conductivity perforated plates, that are separated by a series of spacers that have low thermal conductivity, can provide large values of heat transfer per unit volume. For plates with circular cross-section flow passages, the compactness factor can approach that of gap geometries so that heat exchangers using plates with circular holes can have high performance. The design of low pressure drop heat exchangers is straightforward. Design principles for perforated plate heat exchangers will be given. Experimental results on a prototype system will be presented.