Over the past decades, environmental concerns with respect to thermal, air, and water pollution, as well as the disposal of waste, have motivated the need for energy savings and the increased exploitation of renewable energy sources. These facts have increased the emphasis on the use of high efficiency heat exchangers and have led to the development of more compact heat exchangers.
Plate heat exchangers (PHEs) are categorized at the lower end of the compactness spectrum, and they are widely used for numerous industrial applications, featuring compactness, effectiveness, design flexibility and low cost. The corrugated plate heat exchanger has a great flexibility than the other types of heat exchangers; both its heat transfer area and its cooling flow could be increased or decreased easily, so; it is commonly used for enlargement and upgrading works..
By using CFD simulation, the performance of plate heat exchanger can be optimized and at the same time, it can reduce the operation cost and time when using experimental analysis. CFD simulations of turbulent forced convection heat transfer in a triangular corrugated channel subjected to uniform heat flux were carried out and compared with semi-circular corrugated plate. The computations were performed for a symmetrical triangular corrugated channel with varying Reynolds numbers (10000 ≤ Re ≤40000), volume fractions (6%). Based on the results obtained by the CFD calculations it is found that: From the CFD analysis it has been observed that in case of triangular corrugated plate heat exchanger the Nusselt number increased by 10.52 % as compared to semi-circular corrugated plate heat exchanger. Friction factor decreased by 6.36 % as compared to semi-circular corrugated plate heat exchanger.
