Experimental and theoretical analysis of the local condensation heat transfer in a plate heat exchanger

Plate heat exchanger (PHE) are today widely used in industrial heat transfer applications due to their good thermal performance, modest space requirement, easy accessibility to all areas and their lower capital and operating costs as compared to shell-and-tube heat exchangers. Although authoritative models for the design of PHE used as condensers are missing, the number of applications where a PHE is operating as a condenser increases. On the way to a reliable model based on physical approaches for the prediction of heat transfer and pressure drop during the condensation process inside a PHE, the flow and heat interactions as well as their dependence on the geometrical parameters of the corrugated plates and the operating conditions must be studied in detail. In this work the stepwise procedure for the fundamental construction of such a model is described. An experimental setup was built to analyze the characteristics of the two-phase-flow in PHE. A single gap, consisting of two transparent corrugated plates, was tested with a two-phase flow of air/water and also with boiling refrigerant R365mfc. Flow pattern maps were constructed for plates with corrugation angles of 27 and 63 degrees relative to the direction of flow. Investigations of the local heat transfer coefficients and the pressure drop were done with the same plates. The measurement of the local heat transfer coefficients was carried out by the use of the "Temperature Oscillation InfraRed Thermography" (TOIRT) method. Based on these results three main flow patterns are defined: film flow, bubbly flow and slug flow. For each of the three flow patterns an own model for the heat transfer and pressure drop mechanism are developed and the heat transfer coefficient and the friction factor is calculated with different equations depending on the actual steam quality, mass flow and geometrical parameters by means of a flow pattern map. The theory of the flow pattern based prediction models is proved with own experimental data. The measurements were carried out with an experimental setup in a technical scale. The refrigerant cycle works with R134a as refrigerant and involves two PHEs, used as condenser and evaporator, and a 55 kWel compressor for the compression of the vapor phase. The setup allows the measurement of quasi-local heat transfer coefficients inside the PHEs. Additional heat exchangers assure saturated vapor at the inlet and saturated liquid at the outlet of the condenser.