Thermally Developing 3D Cross Flow Between Cross Corrugated Parallel Plates in Evaporative Coolers

The 3D cross flow between parallel corrugated plates with perpendicular directions of corrugation is numerically modeled as a laminar, incompressible, steady flow. The present work tries to investigate the thermally developing characteristics of the flow in this type of geometry, in the case of constant temperature on walls. The main emphasis is on introducing correlations for saturation efficiency and simply modeling the evaporation process within evaporative coolers with such geometries. The applied numerical method is the Chorin’s artificial incompressibility method and finite difference discretization is used to model the Navier-Stokes and energy equations in a structured mesh. The results show that saturation efficiency decreases with increase in Reynolds number. This also depends on the depth of evaporative media along the flow direction. Increasing the number of waves along the flow direction, results higher saturation efficiencies and also more pressure drop. For a specific saturation efficiency, the overall pressure drop decreases at higher amplitude to wavelength ratios. Also the overall pressure drop grows as the depth of the domain increases. The same trend is observed for experimental data of commercial evaporative pads.