Parametric Study of an Innovative Counter-Flow Heat Exchanger

An innovative Counter-Flow Sand Heat Exchanger (CFS-HX) is proposed, which makes use of very small solid particles as intermediate medium to perform heat transfer between two gas flows at different temperature. The potential of the CFS-HX was already demonstrated by the authors, both theoretically and experimentally. In this work, a parametric study has been employed in order to explore the capabilities of the proposed heat exchanger. A 1D model (validated by experiments) has been extensively used to perform sensitivity analyses with respect to the major design parameters, i.e.: specific heats, gas and sand densities, particle diameter, prescribed efficiency. Pipe length to obtain a prescribed heat exchanger efficiency has been calculated for a large number of configurations and results have been compared with a baseline case. The proposed computations show that a high efficient heat exchange can be obtained with relatively short pipes and with negligible pressure drop.