Abstract—Heat exchanger is an essential device used in complex engineering systems related to heat transfer processes in many industrial applications. Plate Heat Exchanger (PHE) is an important part of a condensing or evaporating system. Among many of factors which should concentrate on, the heat transfer and pressure drop is most important part during sizing and rating the performance of PHE. Due to the complex corrugated surface design flow is highly turbulent. This makes design of plate heat exchanger using empirical correlations to deviate from actual. Sometimes flow medium cannot distribute uniformly which affects the performance of plate heat exchanger. The optimization problem is formulated as the minimization of the heat transfer area, subject to constraints on the number of channels, pressure drop, flow velocity and thermal effectiveness, as well as the exchanger thermal and hydraulic model. Nowadays PHE widely use in different industries such as chemical, food and pharmaceutical process and refrigeration (ZhenHua et al., 2008). However in present work PHE applied in the dairy milk pasteurizer plant model. Milk is pasteurized for killing the bacteria and preserving milk for long time. Present thesis emphasizes the CFD application to design optimization of pasteurizer plant. Thesis covers validation of CFD results with test and analytical results. Temperature distribution, flow combination and comparison of material thermal conductivity is studied. This thesis considers full assembly analysis of pasteurizer unit.

Index Terms—Plate heat exchanger, Pressure drop, Temperature distribution, Parallel flow, Counter flow

Cite: Vinay Patil*, Manjunath H and Basavaraj Kusammanavar, "Validation of Plate Heat Exchanger Design Using CFD," International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics Research, Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 222-230, October 2013.