Experimental and numerical analysis of the impact of a liquid flow rate on the operational performance of a cross-flow tube-and-fin heat exchanger

The paper is dedicated to an issue of the influence of a nonuniform flow of mediums in a cross-flow water-air heat exchanger, the core of which is a bundle of elliptical finned tubes. The main purpose of the work is to determine the impact of non-uniform water inflow for various mass flow rates on the thermal efficiency of the heat exchanger. Multivariate analyses were carried out for various temperatures of water, and for measured nonuniform air distribution at the heat exchanger input. Two variants of water distribution were considered: non-uniform water distribution assumed considering a non-uniform air inflow and water distribution resulting from hydraulic resistances calculated for different locations of water inlet and outlet nozzles. Simulation results were compared with the experimental outcomes obtained in cases of the non-uniform natural inflow of both mediums and to the computation results for a case of the uniform media inflow. The results obtained in this work confirm the significant deterioration of the thermal efficiency of heat exchangers caused by a non-uniform media inflow (by as much as 18.5% compared to the case of a uniform media inflow) which is compliant with other numerous works. The control of the water flow through the individual heat exchanger tubes enables the improvement of thermal efficiency by 4.5% to 18.6% compared to the device with uncontrolled inflow of working fluids, which for some of the analyzed cases is even better than a completely uniform inflow of heat carriers.