A Three-Dimensional Thermo-hydrodynamic Simulation of Compact Cross-Flow Plate Heat Exchanger

This study is dedicated to the thermal analysis and thermo-hydrodynamic simulation of an air-to-air plate heatexchanger in order to solve its routine problem in industry. The compact type of cross-flow plate heat exchanger,in which corrugated plates pile up tightly and delicately brazed to each other, has been used in many situationsand has many applications from food industries to petroleum and military. Routinely, after a certain lifespan, thebrazed joints are detached and cause a mixture of hot and cold fluids as well as highly reduction of heat exchangerperformance. This problem leads to increase the system maintenance significantly. Apart from the imposed costand time for its maintenance, which is indeed a crucial problem? Finally, to have a better understanding, a threedimensional numerical investigation on thermo-hydrodynamic analysis of conjugate heat transfer was performedusing computational fluid dynamics techniques. Forced convection heat transfer for fluid flow and conductionthrough solid material were considered as well. For simulation of steady state flow of Newtonian fluid, the governingequation was discredited by finite volume method and solved by the semi-implicit method for the pressure-linkedequation. It was also found that both temperature and temperature gradient play an important role in this problem.