Applied CFD and Experiment for Automotive Compact Heat Exchanger Development

This paper chronicles a heat exchanger development project that utilized an integrated development process. A combination of full-scale heat exchanger performance testing, flow visualization experiments, and computational fluid dynamics methods were used in concert to investigate flow phenomena in multilouver fins. The primary goal of this project was to confirm the flow and heat transfer enhancement mechanisms at work in multilouver fins. A second goal was correlation of flow visualization, CFD, and traditional full-scale heat exchanger testing. Excellent agreement was found between the three methods.