NUMERICAL SIMULATION AND FIELD SYNERGY ANALYSIS OF FLOW AND HEAT TRANSFER PERFORMANCE OF LOUVERED FIN ARRAY WITH VARIOUS LOUVER ANGLES

Louvered fin heat exchanger has potential heat transfer effectiveness as one type of compact heat exchangers, so it has been widely used in the automobile and heating, ventilation and air-conditioning industries for enhancing air-side heat transfer. Plenty of air-side performance analysis had been conducted to louvered fin arrays, universally with respect to experimental study and numerical simulation in terms of heat transfer Colburn j factor and Fanning friction factor f. In the present study, three-dimensional numerical simulation of air-side thermal hydraulic performance was executed with the state-of-the-art commercial software package Fluent 6.2. Several samples of louvered fin arrays with different louver angles were used in order to analyze the accordance of the flow field and temperature gradient field, which was acknowledged as field synergy extent. The corresponding air-side Reynolds numbers based on louver pitch were varied from 100 to 700. At length, the field synergy analysis based on the numerical results demonstrated that, the stand or fall for air-side thermal-hydraulic performance of louvered fin arrays was relative with the accordance degree of field synergy. It suggested the feasibility of the field synergy principle in analyzing thermal hydraulic performance and heat transfer enhancement.