Effect of inlet flow maldistribution on the passage arrangement design of multi-stream plate-fin heat exchanger

Inlet flow maldistribution has deteriorative influence on the thermal performance of multi-stream plate-fin heat exchanger, which affects the design of passage arrangement. In this paper, the optimization design of passage arrangement considering inlet flow maldistribution is investigated. A thermal model based on integral mean temperature difference is developed for evaluating the coupling effects of inlet flow distribution and passage arrangement on the total heat transfer rate of multi-stream plate-fin heat exchanger, the model is validated with ±6.71% root-mean-square errors of heat transfer rate under uniform flow with 20 groups of simulation data of Aspen Plate Fin Exchanger (Single)®. Then three representative one-dimensional inlet mass flow distributions are adopted to characterize the inlet flow maldistribution. Passage arrangement under these flow maldistributions are optimized using hybrid particle swarm algorithm. By carrying out the optimization, the total heat transfer rate increased 2.50% and 4.52% under different inlet flow maldistributions of Flow A; and increased by 2.58-3.98% under different inlet flow maldistributions of Flow A of Flow B simultaneously.