Experimental and theoretical investigation of the performance of an air to water multi-pass heat pipe-based heat exchanger

Hussam Jouhara, Sulaiman Almahmoud, Daniel Brough, Valentin Guichet, Bertrand Delpech, Amisha Chauhan, Lujean Ahmad and Nicolas Serey

Energy, 2021, vol. 219, issue C

Abstract: In this paper, the performance of a multi-pass heat pipe-based heat exchanger (HPHE) is investigated experimentally and theoretically. The heat pipe system consists of copper heat pipes in a specific equatorially staggered configuration to facilitate heat transportation from a hot gas (air) to a water flow, which cools the condenser section of these heat pipes. The effect of the Reynolds number on the heat transfer rate was studied by altering the number of passes for the evaporator section for the same system by the incorporation of various baffles and by varying the water flow rate. The experimental results have highlighted the strong correlation between heat exchanger performance and the Reynolds number. By increasing the number of passes from one to five, the effectiveness of the HPHE was improved by more than 25%. It has been demonstrated that increasing the number of passes increases the Reynolds number of the flow, leading to higher heat transfer coefficients and lower thermal forced convection resistances. The HPHE overall performance, as well as, the outlet temperatures of the fluids were predicted through two theoretical models, based on the Log Mean Temperature Difference (LMTD) method and the Effectiveness-Number of Transfer Units (ε-NTU) method. The predictions were compared with experimental results and the accuracy of the models reported. The validation showed that the developed iterative LMTD model predicted the performance of the HPHE within ±15.5% error. In comparison, the ε-NTU model predicted the total effectiveness with a maximum error of 19% and was able to predict the outlet temperatures of both air and water streams within an accuracy of ±0.7 °C. The reported research is of importance for the application of heat pipe heat exchangers in waste heat recovery. Finally, knowledge is provided on the accuracy of the available prediction models.

Keywords: Heat pipe heat exchanger; Multi-pass; Reynolds number; LMTD; Effectiveness-NTU (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544220327316
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:219:y:2021:i:c:s0360544220327316

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2020.119624

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().