Design and development of a trapezoidal plate fin heat exchanger for the prediction of heat exchanger effectiveness

A trapezoidal plate-fin exchanger was designed, developed, to test the plate fin heat exchanger effectiveness. It was constructed in a 5 layer cross-flow arrangement. The dimensions of the trapezoidal fins were height, thickness, top-width and bottom-width as 380mm, 40mm, 0.5mm, 20mm, and 80mm respectively. Thereafter, was used to determine the thermo- hydraulic performance of the given heat exchanger at different mass flow rates of 4.975 kg/s to 9.751 kg/s, at a hot inlet temperature of 369K. The values of the effectiveness obtained were plotted against mass flow rate, to account for variation. The evaluated results showed that mass flow rate was proportional to the temperature drop of the fluids. Correspondingly, increase in mass flow rate, increases the effectiveness of the heat exchanger. This suggests that the effectiveness of 0.98 using trapezoidal plate fin heat exchanger result provides benchmark data to evaluate and predicts the performance of a plate-fin heat exchanger.