A numerical study of flow distribution effect on a parallel flow heat exchanger

The effect of flow distribution on thermal and flow performance of a parallel flow heat exchanger has been numerically investigated, The flow distribution has been altered by varying the geometrical parameters that included the locations of the separators, and the inlet/outlet of the heat exchanger. Flow nonuniformities along paths of the heat exchanger, which were believed to be dominantly influential to the thermal performance, have been observed to eventually optimize the design of the heat exchanger. The optimization has been accomplished by minimizing the flow nonuniformity that served as an object function when the Newton's searching method was applied. It was found that the heat transfer of the optimized model increased approximately 7.6%, and the pressure drop decreased 4.7%, compared to those of the base model of the heat exchanger.