Heat Transfer Characteristics in a Plate-Fin Heat Exchanger with Single-Phase Flow

Abstract

High-efficiency heat exchangers are essential to liquefy hydrogen, which is spotlighted as a next-generation energy source. Among the heat exchangers, plate-fin heat exchanger has a very large effective heat transfer area per unit volume, which allows the simultaneous exchange of several fluids, so it is specialized in the hydrogen liquefaction process. However, very few studies have been conducted for heat transfer analysis of plate-fin heat exchangers. Therefore, in this paper, the single-phase convective heat transfer coefficients were calculated using the modified Wilson plot method, and pressure drop was compared with other correlations. The main results are summarized as follows. The pressure drop agrees well with the previous correlation, but the convective heat transfer coefficients has different from others. Therefore, based on the experimental results, a new single-phase heat transfer correlation for the plate fin heat exchanger is presented.