Numerical analysis of non-isothermal Newtonian flows in plate heat exchangers

Abstract

Plate heat exchangers (pHE's) are widely used in chemical, pharmaceutical, biochemical processing, food, and dairy industries, offering this type of equipments several advantages like the low space requirement, high efficiency, easy cleaning and maintenance, low fouling tendency and high flexibility (Reppich, 1999). Heat transfer in a PRE is strongly dependent on geometrical properties of the chevron plates, namely on corrugation angle, area enlargement factor and channel aspect ratio. Besides tilese factors, heat transfer is also influenced by the local variation of temperature dependent physical properues and especially the variable viscosity effects (Kaka, and Liu, 2002; Manglik and Ding, 1997). The design of this heat exchange equipment involve the determination of optimum pressure drops being referenced in the literature several studies directed to this subject (Bassiouny and Martin, 1984; Leuliet et aI., 1990; Stasiek et aI., 1996; Mehrabian and Poulter, 2000).