CFD investigation of Plate Channels

Sammanfattning: Alfa Laval has a wide product range for plate heat exchangers that can be applied in most industries. The constant development of new and old heat exchangers drive the need for new and efficient methods that can reliably be used in the development process. In this thesis, a new turbulence model within a computational fluid dynamics-program has been tested and evaluated for one of Alfa Lavals commercial plate heat exchangers to see if better results can be achieved compared to older models. This project has been divided into three main parts. Firstly, a mesh-study was conducted for a typical heat exchanger geometry in order to understand mesh-size in relation to interesting parameters. Secondly, since the turbulence-model has a set of parameters for tuning the flow, an initial parameter study was conducted. Testing combinations of the parameters on a smaller geometry. This was also combined with a high-resolved large eddy simulation (LES) to study the parameters effect on local phenomenons. Lastly, a global parameter-study was conducted for the commercial plate heat exchanger. The project showed that better accuracy can be achieved with certain sets of model-parameters depending on different plate-combinations. Future work is however needed as it could be interesting to further study local phenomenons using a LES-model on a plate heat exchanger that has experimental data, but most importantly test the GEKO-model for more heat exchangers.