Corrugated plate heat exchanger review

Abstract

The developments and the enhancements in all the heat transfer equipments are mainly purposed for energy savings and savings in projects capital investment, through reducing the costs (energy or material). The better heat exchanger is one that transfer's high heat rate at low pumping power with a minimum cost. The spent of money for the research and development in corrugated plate heat exchangers, in last decades, from some companies, offered different and versatile types and models of that heat exchanger. In the current study I made a focus on researcher's efforts in research and developments for corrugated plate heat exchanger. This type of heat exchangers is widely used for different engineering fields and applications. Research reactors represent one of the important engineering fields that extensively use corrugated plate heat exchangers due to their simplicity in assembly/disassembly and their easy maintainability. The corrugated plate heat exchanger has a great flexibility than the other types of heat exchangers; both its heat transfer area and its cooling flow could be increased or decreased easily, so; it is commonly used for enlargement and upgrading works. The current revision incorporated different topics like; the plate heat exchanger structure, thermal performance, heat transfer enhancement mechanisms as well as plate heat exchanger advantages and limitations. The corrugated plate heat exchanger works efficiently in both single phase and two phase flow, while the two phase flow region still needs a lot of research work. Also; the corrugated plate heat exchanger thermal performance and pressure drop behaviours when using nano-fluids were discussed in the current revision.