Testing and Design of a Microchannel Heat Exchanger with Multiple Plates

The microheating system is one of the hard cores of a microchemical system. In this paper, the performance of microchannel heat exchangers (MCHEs) with two plates made of stainless steel was investigated experimentally. The maximum volumetric heat transfer coefficient was up to 5.2 MW/m(3).K with a corresponding pressure drop of less than 20 kPa under a Reynolds number of around 65. The correlations of average Nusselt number and pressure drop to Reynolds number in microchannels were presented for designing MCHEs with multiple plates with the same geometric structure being researched, and the validity of correlations L was verified through MCHEs with two plates and ten plates. Moreover, experimental results verified that MCHEs can be applied to recover energy in integrated microstructure systems of thermal and chemical processes via a system of ethanol dehydration to ethylene