Conference Year
2021
Keywords
Fatigue Analysis, Stress Analysis, Heat Exchangers, High Performance
Abstract
Air-to-refrigerant heat exchangers (HX) are key components in Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning, and Refrigeration (HVAC&R) systems. For such HXs, the air-side convective resistance is the dominant factor which limits the heat transfer performance. Using non-round shape-optimized tubes and headers can successfully solve the problem leading to high performance HXs. However, the non-round shape tubes and headers may cause some fatigue issues in practices causing the failure during use. Therefore, it is desired to conduct fatigue analysis of such HXs designs to seek designs which can provide both high performance and high strength simultaneously. In present work, a framework of fatigue analysis of high-performance HXs has been developed and implemented. In the framework, the HXs were modeled using commercial Finite Element Analysis (FEA) software, SIMULIATM Abaqus FEA. Based on the stress analysis results, a fatigue analysis was conducted using fe-safe software for multiple metal materials to estimate the HX lifetime before failure occurs.