A Novel Gas-Water Heat Exchanger With Minichannels

In the current study, a novel gas water heat exchanger with minichannels is designed, built and tested. The heat exchanger is mainly composed of a number of concentric ring shaped plates, which are made up of several heat exchanger tubes. The ring shaped plates are arranged in parallel and placed in a shell. The heat exchanger is designed as a counter current heat exchanger with laminar flow on the heat exchanger’s shell-side (gas side) and therefore has a very low pressure drop on the shell side. The heat exchanger was tested with water and hot air on its tube-side and shell-side respectively. All the necessary parameters like inlet and outlet temperatures on tube-side and shell-side as well as the pressure drop, flow rate of fluids, etc. were measured. Different existing correlations were used to calculate the overall heat transfer coefficient and the results were compared with the measured value. The measured results show that the new designed heat exchanger can achieve a good heat transfer performance and also maintain a low pressure drop on shell-side (gas side).