Abstract:
The present research investigated the fabrication and performance test of a closed-loop heat pipe heat exchanger for gas-to-gas heat transfer. The heat pipe heat exchanger was fabricated from two car radiators which are 60 cm. in width and 40 cm. in length. Each car radiator contained 118 flat tubes arranged in 2 in-line rows with multilouver fins. To construct the heat pipe heat exchanger, both radiators are connected with 1 3/8 inch-in-diameter copper tubes and pure water is used as working fluid. The method of boiling the working fluid together with evacuation is used to make the heat pipe heat exchanger. Performance tests are carried out at various fill ratios (40, 55, 70 and 90 percent of the evaporator heating area), various inlet temperatures of hot air (50, 60, 70, 80, 90 and 100 degrees Celcius) and various flow rates of both hot and cold streams (2-6 meter/sec). From the experiments, it was found that the fill ratio of 55-90 percent yielded very good heat transfer performance. Regarding the effect of flow rate, it was found that the higher the flow rate, the higher the heat transfer rate. The effect was stronger in the case of the flow rate of hot stream. But at low fill ratios, when the flow rate reached some point, the heat transfer rate did not increase but tended to decrease instead. Our experimental results for the case of 90 percent fill ratio, showed that the value of U ranged between 27-63 watt/m²-degree Celcius, and a maximum heat transfer was found at hot air velocity 6 meter/sec, cold air velocity 4 meter/sec and inlet hot air temperature 100 degree Celcius, yielding 27 kilowatt. In this case the value of U is 62.6 watt/m²-degree Celcius. This work also determines the correlation for predicting the overall heat transfer coefficient of the fabricated heat exchanger in the form UA = cRe[superscript *b](∆T)[subscript ln][superscript a] where the constants a, b and c all depend on the prevailing fill ratio.