Numerical Simulation And Experimental Research On The Performance Of Groove Plate Air Preheater

As a key equipment in waste heat recovery, plate air preheater has a wide applicate prospect with high heat transfer coefficient, low pressure drop, compact structure, modularizing production & installation and large-scale development. With the rapid development of large-scale technology in chemical equipment, the need of plate air preheater in large-scale hydrogen production industry is growing particularly. Meanwhile, the domestic research of plate air preheater is rare and the majority of the markets are occupied by foreign manufacturers.So the research on heat transfer and flow resistance performance of plate air preheater becomes extremely important.The object of this research is a new type of groove plate air preheater developed in cooperation with Jiangsu Yanxin company. As the development of a new product, it is very necessary to test its heat transfer and flow resistance performance, to obtain correlation of heat transfer coefficient and drag coefficient. In this paper, using the orthogonal experimental method and equal velocity method to test the thermal performance of the air preheater. Orthogonal experimental results show that, with the increase of cold and hot fluid flow rate, the total heat transfer coefficient and resistance loss of the heat exchanger are both increasing, and temperature has little effect on the results; Through the equal velocity method, Nusselt number criterion, the relationship between heat transfer factor J and friction factor f and Reynolds number Re are obtained.CFD numerical simulation method used, two aspects of experimental prototype and optimization designed structures are analysed. The simulation results and experimental results are in good agreement with each other. It verifies the accuracy of the results and the numerical method is reliable. When the Reynolds number Re = 3500 ~ 28000, the relations in the simulation results can be used to guide the design. Structure optimization numerical simulation is to change the height of groove in the plate air preheater and analyse the results in compared with each other. It shows that, the comprehensive heat transfer performance of air pre heater with groove structures is higher than the flat plate type, and the performance of the heat transfer and resistance of the experimental prototype, with 12 mm height of groove is less than the preheater model, whos groove structure height is 6mm. The research in this paper provides a better data support for the structure optimization design and industrial application of this type of plate air preheater.