Effect of phase shift of a sinusoidal plate heat exchanger on the heat transfer characteristics

Heat transfer in a corrugated plate heat exchanger is studied for varying phase shifts (0o, 45o, 90o, 135o and 180o) through experimentation to determine the phase shift which produces maximum heat transfer. Water is used as hot and cold fluids in the experiment. The heat exchanger is made up of eleven channels out of which six are for cold and five for hot water. The fluids enter parallelly from the bottom of the heat exchanger. The flowrate of the hot water is kept constant while the cold water flowrates are varied. It is also found that the maximum temperature difference is obtained at 0o and minimum at 180o. The experimental data show that the average heat transfer, overall heat transfer coefficient and average thermal length are the highest at 0o and decrease as the phase shift increases. The higher thermal length signifies that there is a highest heat transfer at 0o and lowest heat transfer at 180o respectively. Therefore, 0o or no shift with ΔX= 6mm spacing is found to be better due to its effective heat transfer and higher thermal length