**7. Conclusion**

An experimental investigation has been conducted to measure the condensation heat transfer coefficient and the pressure drop of R410A and R22 in BPHEs with chevron angles of 20, 35, and 45 degrees. The experimental data were taken at two different condensation temperatures of 20°C and 30°C in the range of mass flux of 14-34 kg/m2s with a heat flux of 4.7 -5.3 kW/m2.


Although compact heat exchangers with corrugated plates offer many advantages compared to conventional heat exchangers, their main drawback is the absence of a general design method. The variation of their basic geometric details (i.e. aspect ratio, shape and angle of the corrugations) produces various design configurations, but this variety, although it increases the ability of compact heat exchangers to adapt to different applications, renders it very difficult to generate an adequate 'database' covering all possible configurations. Thus, CFD simulation is promising in this respect, as it allows computation for various geometries, and study of the effect of various design configurations on heat transfer and flow characteristics.

In an effort to investigate the complex flow and heat transfer inside this equipment, this work starts by simulating and studying a simplified channel and, after gaining adequate experience, it continues by the CFD simulation of a module of a compact heat exchanger consisting of two corrugated plates. The data acquired from former simulation is consistent with the single corrugated plate results and verifies the importance of corrugations on both flow distribution and heat transfer rate. To compensate for the limited experimental data concerning the flow and heat transfer characteristics, the results are validated by comparing the overall Nusselt numbers calculated for this simple channel to those of a commercial heat exchanger and are found to be in reasonably good agreement. In addition, the results of the simulation of a complete heat exchanger agree with the visual observations in similar geometries.

Since the simulation is computationally intensive, it is necessary to employ a cluster of parallel workstations, in order to use finer grid and more appropriate CFD flow models. The results of this study, apart from enhancing our physical understanding of the flow inside compact heat exchangers, can also contribute to the formulation of design equations that could be appended to commercial process simulators. Additional experimental work is needed to validate and support CFD results, and towards this direction there is work in progress on visualization and measurements of pressure drop, local velocity profiles and heat transfer coefficients in this type of equipment.
