Heat Transfer Engineering, Vol.26, No.6, 7-15, 2005
The fin-on-plate heat exchanger: A new configuation for air-cooled power plants
The objective of this work was to study performance of a new design for air-cooled heat rejections units to be used in power plants or process industries. This heat exchanger was specially designed to provide a trite counter-current flow path for the vapor (process fluid) and the air. In this new design, offset strip fins were used along the path of the air, thus providing a low pressure drop path for air while periodically breaking the thermal and hydraulic boundary layers at each fin strip. The air-side pressure drop was lower in this configuration compared to the conventional tube-and-fin heat exchangers because the drag force was significantly reduced. Lower pressure drops allowed air at higher velocities to be passed through the fins, hence achieving higher air-side heat-transfer coefficients by as much as 80% for the same pressure drop. In this work, we experimentally investigated the processes of heat and mass transfer in film condensation of steam in forced-flow through the plate side of this new heat exchanger.