A Numerical Study of Flow and Temperature Maldistribution in a Parallel Microchannel System for Heat Removal in Microelectronic Devices

Author(s):  
Manoj Siva ◽  
Arvind Pattamatta ◽  
Sarit Kumar Das

A common assumption in basic heat exchanger design theory is that fluid is distributed uniformly at the inlet of the exchanger on each fluid side and throughout the core. However in reality, uniform flow distribution is never achieved in a heat exchanger and is referred to as flow maldistribution. Flow maldistribution is generally well understood for the macrochannel system. But it is still unclear whether the assumptions underlying the flow distribution in conventional macrochannel heat exchangers hold good for microchannel system. In this regard, extensive numerical simulations are carried out in a ‘U’ type parallel micro-channel system in order to study flow and heat transfer maldistribution and validated with in-house experimental data. A detailed parametric analysis is carried out to characterize flow maldistribution in a microchannel system and to study the effect of geometrical factors such as number of channels, n, Area of cross section of the channel Ac, manifold cross section area Ap, and flow parameter such as Reynolds number, Re, on the pressure and temperature distribution. In order to minimize the variation in pressure and to reduce temperature hot spots in the microchannel, a Response surface based surrogate approximation (RSA) and a gradient based search algorithm are used to arrive at the best configuration of microchannel cooling system. A three level factorial design involving three parameters namely Ac/Ap, Re, n are considered. The results from the optimization indicate that the case of n = 5, Ac/Ap = 0.12, and Re = 100 is the best possible configuration to alleviate flow maldistribution and hotspot formation in microchannel cooling system.

Author(s):  
V. Manoj Siva ◽  
Arvind Pattamatta ◽  
Sarit Kumar Das

A common assumption in basic heat exchanger design theory is that fluid is distributed uniformly at the inlet of the exchanger on each fluid side and throughout the core. However, in reality, uniform flow distribution is never achieved in a heat exchanger and is referred to as flow maldistribution. Flow maldistribution is generally well understood for the macrochannel system. But it is still unclear whether the assumptions underlying the flow distribution in conventional macrochannel heat exchangers hold good for microchannel system. In this regard, extensive numerical simulations are carried out in a “U” type parallel microchannel system in order to study flow and heat transfer maldistribution and validated with in-house experimental data. A detailed parametric analysis is carried out to characterize flow maldistribution in a microchannel system and to study the effect of geometrical factors such as number of channels, n, Area of cross section of the channel Ac, manifold cross section area Ap, and flow parameter such as Reynolds number, Re, on the pressure and temperature distribution. In order to minimize the variation in pressure and to reduce temperature hot spots in the microchannel, a response surface based surrogate approximation and a gradient based search algorithm are used to arrive at the best configuration of microchannel cooling system. A three level factorial design involving three parameters namely Ac/Ap, Re, n are considered. The results from the optimization indicate that the case of n = 7, Ac/Ap = 0.69, and Re = 100 is the best possible configuration to alleviate flow maldistribution and hotspot formation in microchannel cooling system.


2011 ◽  
Vol 110-116 ◽  
pp. 2529-2536 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nityanand Pawar ◽  
R.S. Maurya

The performance of a plate heat exchanger (PHE) is severely influenced by non-uniform distribution of flow among its channels. Not only the PHEs, but many other process equipment needs uniform flow distribution for their optimum performance. Flow maldistribution (non-uniform distribution) is a common design problem which always puzzles process equipment designers. Being important design parameters, it has been investigated by several researchers and case based solution has been proposed and documented. Present numerical work is intended to target this aspect of the problem of PHEs but starts with a general investigation with simple multichannel geometry. The numerical setup consists of two headers having multiple channels for U-and Z-turn flow configuration under multichannel geometry and a simplified PHE for plate heat exchanger simulation. The problem has been investigated from hydrodynamic and thermodynamic view point. For hydrodynamic study, flow has been varied for Reynolds number 120 to 17600. It has been found that channel flow goes on reducing along downstream side. In thermal study the effect of wall temperature on air flow mal distribution has been investigated. Numerical results have been validated with the experimental results. Investigation reveals new features of flow mal-distribution which is helpful in better understanding of associated mal-distribution physics.


Author(s):  
Li Yabing ◽  
Zhang Han ◽  
Xiao Jianjun

A dynamic film model is developed in the parallel CFD code GASFLOW-MPI for passive containment cooling system (PCCS) utilized in nuclear power plant like AP1000 and CAP1400. GASFLOW-MPI is a widely validated parallel CDF code and has been applied to containment thermal hydraulics safety analysis for different types of reactors. The essential issue for PCCS is the heat removal capability. Research shows that film evaporation contributes most to the heat removal capability for PCCS. In this study, the film evaporation model is validated with separate effect test conducted on the EFFE facility by Pisa University. The test region is a rectangle gap with 0.1m width, 2m length, and 0.6m depth. The water film flowing from the top of the gap is heated by a heating plate with constant temperature and cooled by countercurrent air flow at the same time. The test region model is built and analyzed, through which the total thermal power and evaporation rate are obtained to compare with experimental data. Numerical result shows good agreement with the experimental data. Besides, the influence of air velocity, wall temperature and gap widths are discussed in our study. Result shows that, the film evaporation has a positive correlation with air velocity, wall temperature and gap width. This study can be fundamental for our further numerical study on PCCS.


Author(s):  
Jian Zhou ◽  
Ming Ding ◽  
Haozhi Bian ◽  
Yinxing Zhang ◽  
Zhongning Sun

The parallel compact heat exchangers have been widely applied in the various fields such as heat exchangers in chemical engineering, the solar collector, fuel cells and the passive removal heat exchanger in passive containment cooling system (PCCS), etc. The heat exchangers in the PCCS removes out the heat brought by the steam coming out from the broken reactor or primary cooling system. Therefore, the performance of the passive containment cooling system heat exchanger (PCCS HX) will greatly influence the safety and integrity of the containment. In previous investigations on the parallel compact heat exchangers, attentions are focused on the pressure distribution and flow distribution in the heat exchangers. A bad flow distribution in the heat exchanger will reduce the heat performance. More seriously, the coolant in some tubes may boils and the tubes will be overheated, resulting in explosion of tubes. Therefore, the characteristic of pressure distribution and the flow distribution should be investigated for a uniform flow distribution. In the past studies of the compact heat exchangers, the numbers of tube are almost under 72 which is relatively small, while the number of tubes PCCS HX is usually over than 100. And the pressure distribution in compact heat exchangers is assumed that the pressure recovery plays a leading role. However, the more numbers of tube will bring more flow maldistribution, if the geometry design is selected inappropriately. The reverse flow may occur in the heat exchanger, which means that in some tubes, the coolant flows from the tube outlet to the inlet. This phenomenon of reverse flow have never been mentioned in previous studies. The occurrence of the reverse flow will significantly decrease the performance of the heat exchanger and cause a bad influence on the safety of the containment. In the PCCS, the Z-type heat exchanger is one of the choice of PCCS HX (heat exchanger) design. Therefore, the present study focus on the characteristic of reverse flow phenomenon in Z-type heat exchangers. The pressure distribution and the flow distribution have been separately investigated deeply. The conclusion of this study will provide a guide to the geometry design of the PCCS HX with large number of tubes.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (14n16) ◽  
pp. 2040111
Author(s):  
Shu-Ling Tian ◽  
Ying-Ying Shen ◽  
Yao Li ◽  
Hai-Bo Wang ◽  
Sheryar Muhammad ◽  
...  

Plate-fin heat exchangers are widely used in industry at present due to their compact structure and high efficiency. However, there is a problem of flow maldistribution, resulting in poor performance of heat exchangers. The influence of the header configuration on fluid flow distribution is studied by using CFD software FLUENT. The numerical results show that the fluid flow inside the header is seriously uneven. The reliability of the numerical simulation is validated against the published results. They are found to be basically consistent within considerable error. The optimal number of the punch baffle is investigated. Various header configuration with different opening ratios have been studied under the same boundary conditions. The gross flow maldistribution parameter (S) is used to evaluate flow nonuniformity, and the flow maldistribution parameters of different schemes under different Reynolds numbers are listed and compared. The optimal header with minimum flow maldistribution parameter is obtained through the performance analysis of headers. It is found that the flow maldistribution of the improved header is significantly smaller compared with the conventional header. Hence, the efficiency of the heat exchanger is effectively enhanced. The conclusion provides a reference for the optimization design of plate-fin heat exchanger.


Author(s):  
Richard F. Wright ◽  
James R. Schwall ◽  
Creed Taylor ◽  
Naeem U. Karim ◽  
Jivan G. Thakkar ◽  
...  

The AP1000 is an 1100 MWe advanced nuclear power plant that uses passive safety features to enhance plant safety and to provide significant and measurable improvements in plant simplification, reliability, investment protection and plant costs. The AP1000 received final design approval from the US-NRC in 2004. The AP1000 design is based on the AP600 design that received final design approval in 1999. Wherever possible, the AP1000 plant configuration and layout was kept the same as AP600 to take advantage of the maturity of the design and to minimize new design efforts. As a result, the two-loop configuration was maintained for AP1000, and the containment vessel diameter was kept the same. It was determined that this significant power uprate was well within the capability of the passive safety features, and that the safety margins for AP1000 were greater than those of operating PWRs. A key feature of the passive core cooling system is the passive residual heat removal heat exchanger (PRHR HX) that provides decay heat removal for postulated LOCA and non-LOCA events. The PRHR HX is a C-tube heat exchanger located in the in-containment refueling water storage tank (IRWST) above the core promoting natural circulation heat removal between the reactor cooling system and the tank. Component testing was performed for the AP600 PRHR HX to determine the heat transfer characteristics and to develop correlations to be used for the AP1000 safety analysis codes. The data from these tests were confirmed by subsequent integral tests at three separate facilities including the ROSA facility in Japan. Owing to the importance of this component, an independent analysis has been performed using the ATHOS-based computational fluid dynamics computer code PRHRCFD. Two separate models of the PRHR HX and IRWST have been developed representing the ROSA test geometry and the AP1000 plant geometry. Confirmation of the ROSA test results were used to validate PRHRCFD, and the AP1000 plant model was used to confirm the heat removal capacity for the full-sized heat exchanger. The results of these simulations show that the heat removal capacity of the PRHR HX is conservatively represented in the AP1000 safety analyses.


Author(s):  
Prabhakara Rao Bobbili ◽  
Bengt Sunden

An experimental investigation has been carried out to find the nature of temperature profiles of the process and cooling fluids during steam condensation across the port to channel in plate heat exchangers (PHEs). In the present study, low corrugation angle (30°) plates have been used for different plate package of PHEs with 41 and 81 plates. The process steam entered at 1 bar with a small degree of superheat. Water has been used as the cold fluid. A traverse temperature probe is inserted into both inlet and outlet ports of the plate heat exchanger. The temperature of the process steam and cooling fluid have been measured and recorded at the location of first, middle and last channels for different inlet and exit flow conditions for each plate package of the heat exchanger. Also, the overall pressure drop has been measured at different conditions at the outlet of the process steam, i.e., full and partial condensation. The traverse temperature measurements have indicated that there is a considerable variation in temperature along inlets and outlets of process steam and cooling fluid, due to flow maldistribution. The experimental data has been analyzed to show how the flow distribution on the cooling side affects the condensation of steam in plate heat exchangers. The present results will help to study further the nature of steam condensation in parallel channels of heat exchangers.


2017 ◽  
Vol 79 (7-3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Amirah M. Sahar ◽  
A. I. M. Shaiful

Parallel microchannels have been widely used in cooling of compact electronic equipment due to large contact area with liquid and availability of large mass of fluid to carry away heat. However, understanding of flow distribution for microchannel parallel system is still unclear and there still lack of studies give a clear pictures to understand the complex flow features which cause the flow maldistribution. Generally, the geometrical structure of the manifold and micro channels play an important role in flow distribution between micro channels, which might affects the heat and mass transfer efficiency, even the performance of micro exchangers. A practical design of exchanger basically involves the selection of an optimized solution, keeping an optimal balance between gain in heat transfer and pressure drop penalty. A parallel microchannels configurations consisting inlet and outlet rectangular manifold were simulated to study flow distribution among the channels were investigated numerically by using Ansys Fluent 14.5. The numerical results was validated using existing experimental data and showed a similar trend with values 1% higher than experimental data. The influence of inlet/outlet manifold area and inlet/outlet arrangement on flow distribution in channels were carried out in this study. Based on the predicted flow non-uniformity value, 𝜙, Z- type flow arrangement exhibits higher value of 𝜙, which is 8%, followed by U-type, 2.6% and the I-type, 2.49%. Thus, a better uniformity of velocity and temperature distributions can be achieved in I-shape flow arrangement. The behavior of the flow distributions inside channels is due to the vortices that occurred at manifold. Besides comparing the pressure drop for case 1(D1) and case 2(D2), it is worth to mention that, as the area of inlet and outlet manifold decrease by 50%, the pressure drop is increasing about 5%. However, the inlet/outlet area of manifold on velocity and fluid temperature distributions was insignificant.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Po Hu ◽  
Zhen Hu

In the passive containment cooling system of AP1000, the condensed water is expected to flow down on the inner surface of the steel wall of the containment, and recover to the in-containment refueling water storage tank (IRWST), therefore, to maintain the long-term coolability of the passive residual heat removal system. However, there are attached bulging plates on the inner surface for various engineering needs, such as supporting, and the impingement of condensed water film on these bulging plates can reduce the amount of the recovered water. In this article, a 3-D Eulerian wall film model in FLUENT was used to study a series of flow behaviors when a water film impinged on the bulging plate on a plane surface. The loss ratio of falling film impinging on attached plates of different sizes under different flow rates were calculated and in good agreement with the experiment results. Four stages of the film behavior during the impingement were identified and analyzed; in addition, the influences of the bulging height of attached plate and flow rate were studied. And a correlation between the loss ratio of impinging water film, the bulging height of the attached plate, and the Weber number was obtained.


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