Chevron Plate Heat Exchanger, ANSYS Fluent CFD Simulation Training

Description

Chevron Problem Description

The present problem deals with the simulation of a plate heat exchanger called chevron by ANSYS Fluent software. In this model, water acts as hot and cold fluid flow in a heat exchanger. The plates between the two flows and all the walls of the heat exchanger are made of aluminum, which is responsible for the heat transfer between the cold water and the hot water flow. The purpose of the present problem is to investigate the heat transfer between two hot and cold fluids through a chevron plate located between them.

The assumption for chevron Simulation

Several assumptions are considered for the present simulation:

The simulation is Steady-State, the solver is Pressure-Based, and the gravity effect is ignored.

Geometry & Mesh

The 3-D geometry of the present model is designed by Design Modeler software. Since the model is related to the plate type heat exchanger, it consists of two main parts: hot water flow zone and cold water flow zone. The boundary between these two flow paths is determined by the separator plates (chevron). The non-conformal structured mesh of the present model is carried out by ANSYS Meshing software. The element number is equal to 638892.

CFD Simulation of Chevron Plate Heat Exchanger

Here are some summaries of the problem definition and problem-solving steps in the table:

Models
k-epsilon		Viscous model
Standard		k-epsilon model
Standard wall function		Near wall treatment
on				energy
Boundary conditions (chevron)
Velocity inlet		Inlet type
0.25 m.s-1	velocity	cold water
283.15 K	temperature
0.25 m.s-1	velocity	hot water
343.15 K	temperature
Pressure outlet		Outlet type
0 Pa		cold water
0 Pa		hot eater
wall				Walls type
coupled		Inner plates
insolated		Outer walls
Solution Methods (chevron)
Simple				Pressure-velocity coupling
second-order upwind		pressure		Spatial discretization
first-order upwind		momentum
second-order upwind		energy
first-order upwind		turbulent kinetic energy
first-order upwind		turbulent dissipation rate
Initialization (chevron)
Hybrid		Initialization method

You can obtain Geometry & Mesh file and a comprehensive Training Movie that presents how to solve the problem and extract all desired results.