Overview of the innovative heat exchangers technologies

Abstract

The current paper analyzed the new trends and challenges in heat exchanger technologies. The progress of the studies on mini and micro devices used in industry are presented. Particular attention is paid to the heat exchangers used in marine and chemical industries where the resistance to heat transfer increases due to the fouling or scaling. In the industry, there are very important the reduction in the size of devices, and the micro heat exchangers, due to its variety of advantages offered, are well recognized for their higher performance. The applications of them are ranging from process control to military applications. New engineering approaches for modeling the heat and fluid flow processes in micro heat exchangers are analyzed in the present paper. One of these is based on the dimensional analysis and principles of similitude theory that allow the modeling of microscale systems using a physical system at the mini scale. There are identified constant relationships between dimensions permitting the analysis of the fluid flow through micro channels.