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66 Ionel Ivancu et al.
the second stage consists in the experimental analysis of the heat exchanger.
The main objective of the study is the mutual validation of both analysis
methods, theoretical and experimental.
The paper presents the results obtained in the first stage of the study.
2. The Experimental Heat Exchanger
In order to set out the geometry of the plate heat exchanger, the
information from (Jorge et al., 2004) was used. Two pictures of the heat
exchanger are shown in Fig.1a and Fig.1b. The exchanger size is 300 x 300
mm, with a number of 18 channels for air flow and 17 channels for flue gas
flow. The distance between plates is 5 mm. The clamping of the plates is
realized with threaded rods. The plates were made of galvanized steel.
a b
Fig. 1 – The experimental plate heat exchanger.
In order to develop the experimental study, an experimental stand was
conceived and developed. The experimental study is not the subject of the
present paper and will be accomplished in the next stage of the research.
3. Modelling of Heat Transfer
The CAD modelling of both the separating wall and flow channel was
made with CATIA V5 R19 software. Helpful information in this sense comes
from (Haghshenas et al., 2011), (Gut & Pinto, 2003), (Gut et al., 2004),
(Galeazzo et al., 2011). In order to achieve the temperature distribution in the
separating wall of the exchanger, the Steady-Thermal module of ANSYS v13
was used. To achieve the transfer, forced convective conditions were imposed
for walls in contact with fluids.
For the separating wall there were used hexahedron finite elements. The
mesh was composed of 2548 of elements with 19088 nodes. For the modelling
of the air flow channel, tetrahedral finite elements were used. The mesh was
composed of 28579 elements with 9136 nodes. The mesh for the model is
presented in Fig. 2.