Key
22609
Conference Year
2016
Keywords
Single phase, Pressure drop, Flow distribution, Brazed plate heat exchangers (BPHE)
Abstract
Brazed plate heat exchangers (BPHE) have been widely used in the heating, ventilating, air conditioning, and refrigeration industry, but refrigerant distribution among parallel plate channels is still one of the main issues. Maldistribution of refrigerant among different plate channels is greatly affected by the pressure changes along the inlet and outlet header, and it would generally decrease the performance of BPHE by causing higher pressure drop and poor utilization of heat transfer area. In this paper, the experimental and simulation methods are used to study the single-phase pressure drop and flow distribution in a U-type BPHE. Experiments are conducted to measure the pressure changes along the inlet and outlet header, as well as the pressure difference through each plate channel. And the CFD tool is used to simulate the flow details in the inlet and out header of the BPHE.