Numerical and Experimental Investigation of Wire Cloth Heat Exchanger for Latent Heat Storages

Latent thermal energy storages (LTES) offer a high storage density within a narrow temperature range. Due to the typically low thermal conductivity of the applied phase change materials (PCM), the power of the storages is limited. To increase the power, an efficient heat exchanger with a large heat transfer surface and a higher thermal conductivity is needed. In this article, planar wire cloth heat exchangers are investigated to obtain these properties. They investigated the first time for LTES. Therefore, we developed a finite element method (FEM) model of the heat exchanger and validated it against the experimental characterization of a prototype LTES. As PCM, the commercially available paraffin RT35HC is used. The performance of the wire cloth is compared to tube bundle heat exchanger by a parametric study. The tube diameter, tube distance, wire diameter and heat exchanger distance were varied. In addition, aluminum and stainless steel were investigated as materials for the heat exchanger. In total, 654 variants were simulated. Compared to tube bundle heat exchanger with equal tube arrangement, the wire cloth can increase the mean thermal power by a factor of 4.20 but can also reduce the storage capacity by a minimum factor of 0.85. A Pareto frontier analysis shows that for a free arrangement of parallel tubes, the tube bundle and wire cloth heat exchanger reach similar performance and storage capacities.

Heat Transfer through Wire Cloth Micro Heat Exchanger

The main objective of this study is to calculate and determine design parameters for a novel wire cloth micro heat exchanger. Wire cloth micro heat exchangers offer a range of promising applications in the chemical industry, plastics technology, the recycling industry and energy technology. We derived correlations to calculate the heat transfer rate, pressure drop and temperature distributions through the woven structure in order to design wire cloth heat exchangers for different applications. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations have been carried out to determine correlations for the dimensionless Euler and Nusselt numbers. Based on these correlations, we have developed a simplified model in which the correlations can be used to calculate temperature distributions and heat exchanger performance. This allows a wire cloth micro heat exchanger to be virtually designed for different applications.

Performance Evaluation of Wire Cloth Micro Heat Exchangers

The purpose of this study is to validate a thermal-hydraulic simulation model for a new type of heat exchanger for mass, volume, and coolant/refrigerant charge reduction. The new heat exchanger consists of tubes with diameters in the range of 1 m m and wires in the range of 100 m , woven together to form a 200 × 200 × 80 m m 3 wire cloth heat exchanger. Performance of the heat exchanger has been experimentally evaluated using water as inner and air as outer heat transfer medium. A computational thermal and fluid dynamic model has been implemented in OpenFOAM®. The model allows variation of geometry and operating conditions. The validation of the model is based on one single geometry with an opaque fabric and air-side velocities between 1 and 7 m / s . The simulated and measured pressure drops are found to be in good agreement with a relative difference of less than 16%. For the investigated cases, the effective heat transfer coefficients are in very good agreement (less than 5%) when adapting the contact resistance between tubes and wires. The numerical model describes the fluid flow and heat transfer of the tested heat exchanger with adequate precision and can be used for future wire cloth heat exchanger dimensioning for a variety of applications.

3-D Wire Cloth Electrode for Higher Throughput DielectrophoreticSeparation of Bacterial Cell

Dielectrophoresis (DEP) is one of an alternative way for cell separation. It has mainly been limited to processing small volumes due to constrain in fabrication of microelectrode over large surface areas. This work incorporated the wire cloth electrode fabricated using textile technology into a high throughput chamber experiment. The plain-weave wire cloth consists of 71µm stainless steel wires as the microelectrode arrays hold together by polyester yarn warp. This work determines the cell separation yield with parameters on applied voltage, flow rate and cell concentration as well as its optimized variables on the chamber width of 1.2cm and 2.5cm. The optimum voltage achieved was 30Vpk-pk, with flow rate of 3.5 ml/min and maximum cell concentration of 2.08x107 cells/ml. In chamber width comparison, 1.2cm width chamber gives better total percentage yield of 96% than the 2.5cm width chamber of 85% total percentage yield.

Metabolic Cage for Urine Collection from Small Animals with High Level of Performance and Low Cost

The results of designing the original metabolic cage for urine collection from small laboratory animals consisting of a case, a cylindrical animal chamber with the floor, a funnel, a urine collection vessel and two graded drinking bottles that can be placed at a different height depending on animal age are presented. The case was made of laminated particle board; a cylindrical animal chamber was made of polyethylene terephthalate; a circular floor of the animal chamber was made of stainless steel wire cloth mesh. As a funnel for urine collection, a ribbed glass funnel SIMAX (Czech Republic) was used. To prevent rat feces from entering the urine collection vessel, there were installed two stainless steel wire mesh filter discs, namely a larger disc located on the internal ribbed surface of the funnel and a smaller disc located close to the hole of the funnel tube. To support the urine collection vessel, a metal vessel stand with a deepening was made. Between the vessel and the funnel, there was placed a fine stainless steel metal cylinder preventing urine evaporation. In addition to low cost, the proposed design of the metabolic cage provides high levels of performance as confirmed by its high ability to allow urine to flow freely, as well as to collect urine, significantly smaller volume of urine evaporated, improved housing conditions for animals and allows us to collect the amount of urine more fully reflecting animal diuresis.