Pressure drop studies in a plate heat exchanger

Abstract

AbstractRecent studies on heat transfer in plate heat exchangers have pointed out the need for quantitative expressions for pressure drop in this type of apparatus. This paper presents the results of experimental studies to obtain pressure drop relationships useful in plate heater design.A plastic prototype of a commercial model (Chester‐Jensen) exchanger was fabricated and used to obtain entrance, exit, crossover, ribbed section, and overall pressure drops as a function of velocity with water as the fluid. These individual losses were combined into an expression for overall pressure drop for a series plastic plate pack having any number of plates and employing any fluid.Overall pressure drop data on a commerical Chester‐Jensen Model HTF plate heater were available from several heat transfer studies reported previously. The data for series patterns were resolved by inserting overall pressure drop, physical properties of the fluid, and number of plate passes into the general form of the equation derived for plastic plates and by solving for a new set of constants. The resulting computer‐derived expression was found to predict series pressure drops in the apparatus to ± 10%.From a similar approach it was possible to correlate the overall pressure drop data for the heater for looped flow patterns.