Investigations on the performance of chevron type plate heat exchangers

This paper presents empirical relations for the chevron type plate heat exchangers (PHEs) and demonstrated their validity through comparison of test data of PHEs. In order to examine the performance of PHEs, the pressure drop(Delta P), the overall heat transfer coefficient (U (m) ) and the effectiveness (epsilon) are estimated by considering the properties of plate material and working fluid, number of plates (N (t) ) and chevron angle(beta). It is a known fact that, large surface area of the plate provides more rate of heat transfer () thereby more effectiveness (epsilon). However, there is a possibility to achieve the required performance by increasing the number of plates without altering the plate dimensions, which avoids the new design of the system. Application of the Taguchi's design of experiments is examined with less number of experiments and demonstrated by setting the levels for the parameters and compared the test data with the estimated output responses.