Abstract & Overview
A detailed evaluation of the performance parameters in the laminar flow regime with regard to the enhancement of heat transfer using winglet type vortex generators has been accomplished in this study. Three dimensional numerical studies of flow structure and laminar convectionheat transfer are performed in a plate fin heat exchanger with longitudinal vortex generators (LVGs) in present paper. The Effects of common flow up and common flow down pairs of vortices produced by LVGs with two different shapes of the winglets, a pair of rectangular winglet (RWP) and a pair of delta winglet (DWP), are studied at various Reynolds numbers. The results show that effect of LVGs could effectively enhance the heat transfer of the heat exchanger. According to the non-dimensional defined parameter for evaluation of performance, (Num/Num,0)/(f/f0), the channel with DWP shows better overall performance than RWP. The common flow down configuration of DWP shows a better overall performance at Reynolds numbers lower than 720 and common flow up configuration of DWP shows a better overall performance at Reynolds numbers more than 720; also, the common flow down configuration shows a better overall performance than the common flow up configuration for RWP.