EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION OF PERFORMANCE OF PLATE HEAT EXCHANGER FOR WATER AS WORKING FLUID

Compact heat exchangers are most widely used for heat transfer applications in industries. Plate heat exchanger is one such compact heat exchanger, provides more area for heat transfer between two fluids in comparison with shell and tube heat exchanger. Plate type heat exchangers are widely used for liquid-to-liquid heat transfer applications with high density working fluids. This study is focused on use of plate type heat exchanger for water as a working fluid. This research work deals with experimental investigation of plate type heat exchanger with evaluation of convective heat transfer coefficient, overall heat transfer coefficient, exchanger effectiveness. The heat exchanger used for carrying out this work consists of thin metal welded plates of stainless steel with 1mm thickness, rectangular geometry and distance between two plates is 7mm. This test setup consists of total 16 numbers of plates and it is designed to withstand with 85 0 C temperature, pressure drop is neglected. Tests are conducted by varying operating parameters like mass flow rate, inlet temperatures of hot water. The main objective of this work is to find effects of these parameters on performance of plate heat exchanger with parallel flow arrangement. Results show that, overall heat transfer coefficient and convective heat transfer coefficient increases with increase in mass flow rate and Reynolds number. Also the effectiveness varies slightly with heat capacity ratio. In this study, maximum effectiveness achieved for plate heat exchanger with water as a working fluid is 0.48.Use of plate heat exchanger is more advantageous than the tube type heat exchanger with same effectiveness, as it occupies less space.