Comparative gasketed plate heat exchanger performance prediction with computations, experiments, correlations and artificial neural network estimations

ABSTRACTGasketed plate heat exchangers (GPHEX) are popular due to their small volume, ease of cleaning and high thermal performance. Hydraulic and thermal performance of GPHEX are not as easily determined since they solely depend on the corrugation pattern of the heat exchanger (HEX) plates. Every plate needs its own correlation for Nusselt number and friction factor. Correlation development based on plate-specific experiments is one method of performance prediction. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is also applicable to understand the Nusselt number and friction characteristics. However, since it is difficult to observe the effects of the corrugation pattern computationally, the pattern of the plates is usually ignored and CFD is performed on flat, nonpatterned plates. In addition, correlations developed using experimental data can not exactly predict the performance. In this article, GPHEX computations are performed with corrugated plates and the results are validated via comparison with experiments p...