Abstract
Wavy air fins are used in the construction of aluminum compact heat exchangers which are used in thermal equipment for agriculture, construction, and industrial applications. Since atmospheric air convective heat transfer coefficient is among the lowest of all fluids, there is a special interest in the optimizing of the geometry for this type of heat exchangers. One of the biggest challenges in designing cooling solutions for agriculture applications is the clogging effect on the performances of the heat exchangers. Clogging leads to a critical performance reduction of the compact heat exchanger used for these types of applications. This specific study, which was conducted in RAAL S.A company in collaboration with the University “Politehnica” of Timisoara”, checks the influence of the wavy air fin amplitude on the thermal and hydraulic performances and tries to find an optimum solution suitable for these specific projects. So, starting from the standard existing amplitude, different amplitude values were studied analytically. The analytical studies were further confirmed by real life measurements. The scope of the study was to find an optimal value for the amplitude that can further improve the overall performance of the aluminum compact heat exchangers and reduce the clogging effect.
Highlights
Due to its resistance to damage and its lower degree of clogging than other types of extended surfaces, such as louvered fins, this type of fin is used almost exclusively in the construction of compact heat exchangers which are used in thermal equipment for agriculture, construction, and industrial applications
In recent years there are several papers that have sumarizes and generalizes the criterial relations obtained on the wavy fin from these the one of the Aliabadi et al [11] which compares different relations using different fluids, Gum [12] studied a variation of wavy fin by creating cross cuts
Xiao [13] studied the performances of the wavy fin in evaporative cooling conditions, and the one of the Qasem et al [14] which generalizes the criterial relations of the performances for the wavy fin found in the literature
Summary
This straight section was introduced to reduce the pressure drop of this kind of fin. Studies on this specific type of fin can be found in [15], [16] which study the height and the straight section influence on the wavy fin performances Even if this kind of fin has a lower clogging factor this is still one of the biggest challenges in designing cooling solutions for agriculture applications. This paper presents a numerical study of the influence of the wavy air fin amplitude on the thermal and hydraulic performances of a coolant to air compact heat exchanger. The numerical data is validated using experimental data from a production cooler
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