Analysis on heat transfer enhancement mechanism in a cross-wavy primary surface heat exchanger based on advection thermal resistance method

Abstract

This paper numerically investigates the flow and heat transfer characteristics in the primary surface heat exchanger (PSHE) with cross-wavy (CW) structures. The comprehensive performance affected by hydraulic diameters is evaluated. Moreover, the airflow shuttling behavior at the mixing area of CW-type PSHE is discussed, showing rapid heat transfer enhancement. The advection thermal resistance method and local thermal resistance analysis is proposed, while the impacts of longitudinal pitch and flowrates are considered. Results show that the case with a large hydraulic diameter displays much better comprehensive performance at lower flowrates. When raising the hydraulic diameter from 1.58 mm to 15.8 mm, the heat transfer rate per unit pumping power grows by 36.1 %. However, the priority of large channel is gradually disappeared after increasing the flowrates. Meanwhile, the larger longitudinal pitch of the CW channel may result in pronounced improvement on the heat transfer performance due to the presence of airflow shutting behavior at the mixing area as well as the secondary flow near the channel boundary layers. When no airflow shuttling exists, very high advection thermal resistance region can be observed due to the formation of boundary layers. It can be recognized that the case with airflow shuttling behavior can display similar heat transfer improvement compared to that with increasingly high Reynolds numbers, yet the pressure loss is rarely increased.