Abstract

Due to compact heat exchangers unique features, the industries have great interest in maximizing heat transfer capacity of these devices without considerably increasing pressure drop. These devices can be simply described as solid blocks with several layers of mini/macro channels in which hot and cold streams flow. Due to its complex geometry, numerical simulations are usually used in the literature to predict the thermal and hydraulic behavior of such devices. Although numerical tools are very important for the design of optimized this equipment, they demand large computational resources. In the present work it is proposed a new method to determine hydrodynamic behavior of compact heat exchangers welded by diffusion using porous media approach to model its core. This method requires much lower computational resources and it still presents very precise results. The commercial software ANSYS-CFX® is employed on this study. Also, the Darcy and Forchheimer’s law are used to obtain the core permeability, by the adjustment of macroscopic parameters.