Analysis of entransy dissipation in heat exchangers

The optimization of heat exchangers is an important topic. Entropy generation is used to describe the irreversibility of heat transfer processes and the principle of minimum entropy generation is sometimes used to optimize heat exchanger designs. This paper defines the heat exchanger thermal resistance based on its entransy dissipation and analyses various heat exchangers. Entropy generation analyses are also presented for comparison. The results indicate that the minimum entransy-dissipation-based thermal resistance always corresponds to the highest heat transfer rate, while the design with the minimum entropy generation is not always related to the design with the highest heat transfer rate.