Investigation of Heat Transfer and Flow Characteristics in Heat Exchanger With Microscale Channels

The experimental study of heat transfer and flow characteristics are conducted for water and ethylene-glycol solution flowing in the heat exchanger with rectangular or triangular microscale channels, which have equivalent diameter of 0.55mm, 0.91mm, 1.38mm and 5mm. During experiments, the Reynolds number ranges from 300 to 2500. The experimental results show that: at a fixed Reynolds number, the Nusselt number increases along with increasing equivalent diameter, the Nusselt number for ethylene-glycol solution with larger Prandtl number is greater than that for water, the geometrical configuration of the microscale channels have a significant effect on the heat transfer; the flow friction factors of microscale channels are smaller than that of normal channels, flow characteristics of rectangular channels are evidently better than that of triangular, the flow friction factor decreases with increasing Reynolds number, the experiment also show that the flow friction factor is independent of Prandtl number; The critical Reynolds number at which the flow transiting to turbulent flow is 700∼1200.