Heat Transfer And Flow Characteristics Of Plate Heat Exchanger Filled With Iron-Nickel Foam

The heat transfer equipment is widely used as general-purpose equipment on chemical, refining, power, food, light industry, atomic energy, pharmaceuticals, machinery and many other industrial sectors. In industrial production, the main role of heat transfer equipment is realizing heat transfer between the materials, in order to achieve the indicators of the process and meet the needs of the process. With the development of science and production technology, while promoting the development of high-intensity compact heat exchanger equipment, heat transfer equipment of the new structure is emerging, in order to reduce the consume of materials and increase the heat transfer efficiency. The porous metal foam is a new multi-functional composite material with a certain number and certain size of the aperture. The basic advantages of porous metal foam are good mechanical properties and low weight. It also has other competitive advantages like small proportion of the stiffness, the large surface area, high PPI and high pore density which could enable to occur complex three-dimensional disturbances when fluid flow through metal foam. So it has good heat transfer performance. This paper develops a new type plate heat exchanger filled with iron-nickel metal foam and carries out experimental study and numerical simulation of flow and heat transfer characteristics of this plate heat exchanger. The new plate heat exchanger has small size, low weight and high heat transfer efficiency, so it has significant practical value.The main study content in this paper are as follow:(1) Structural design of new plate heat exchanger filled with iron-nickel foam metal;(2) Experiment and simulation analysis of heat transfer and flow characteristics of new plate heat exchanger filled with iron-nickel foam metal.(3) Experimental research the heat transfer efficiency after filled with iron-nickel foam metal in plate heat exchanger and comparing with pressure drop and heat transfer efficiency while filling with different pore density (PPI) of iron-nickel foam metal;(4) Numerical simulation of flow and heat transfer characteristics of the fluid medium in iron-nickel foam metal and analysis of the influence of different geometric and physical parameters to flow and heat transfer characteristics.Through numerical simulation and experimental study flow and heat transfer characteristics of iron-nickel metal foam filling to a square plate heat exchanger, the following results are obtained:(1) Compare the theoretical results with simulation results, the difference is less than 2%. The numerical simulation results are meeting the theoretical calculation results. When the air flow is large, experimental results are consistent with the numerical simulation. Since the insulation effect of the experiment could not achieve the idealized standard, the heat transfer efficiency measured by experiment is 15% higher than the simulation proceeds in average;(2) With the increasing of air flow, the heat transfer efficiency of plate heat exchanger without filling with foam metal significantly reduced, while the efficiency of plate heat exchanger filling with foam metal increases with the air flow. When a critical value is reached, heat transfer efficiency will be stabilized or shows on a decreasing trend. While filling with different hole density foam metal with same porosity, the influence of hole density changes to heat exchanger efficiency is relatively small.(3) The efficiency of plate heat exchanger filled with iron-nickel foam metal is greatly increased compared with plate heat exchanger without filling with any foam metal. The new plate heat exchanger makes full use of the advantages of porous metal foam such as small proportion, high rigidity, large surface area, high porosity and large pore density. And this new plate heat exchanger has many unique advantages such as small size, low weight, compact structure and high efficiency which has great practical value.The findings of this article provided a reliable basis for analysis of fluid flow and heat transfer characteristics of plate heat exchanger filled with foam metal. And they also have an important significance on process intensification technology and optimization design of highly efficient heat exchanger.