A novel method to improve the performance of heat exchanger—Temperature fields coordination of fluids

Abstract

The methods to enhance the heat transfer in heat exchanger may be classified into two levels: one is to improve the heat transfer coefficient; the other is to upgrade the whole arrangement of the heat exchangers. For the second level, the performance of heat exchanger can be upgraded by increasing the coordination degree between the temperature fields of cold and hot fluids. When the temperature distributions are similar to each other, the temperature difference field (TDF) is more uniform, which means that the temperature fields are more coordinated with each other. For the cross-flow heat exchanger, rearrangement of the heat exchange surface area should improve the heat transfer effectiveness, which is even equal to that of the counter-flow heat exchanger when the surface area is reassigned optimally. For the multi-stream heat exchanger, the thermal performance is also dependent on the uniformity of the TDF, and the parallel-flow arrangement may achieve higher heat exchange effectiveness than the counter-flow arrangement, which indicates that the performance of heat exchanger depends on the coordination degree of temperature fields instead of the flow arrangement.