Heat Transfer Characteristic of Airfoil Microchannel Efficient and Compact Heat Exchanger

Supercritical carbon dioxide (S-CO₂) Brayton cycle system is a new type of high-efficiency energy conversion system used in the fourth generation reactor. The microchannel efficient and compact heat exchanger is used in the system as high or low temperature recuperators. Besides, heat transfer performance and flow characteristics of heat exchanger have significant impacts on the overall energy conversion efficiency of the system. In this paper, the heat exchanger model of airfoil structure was established and the CFD method was used to study the influence of different spacing of fins on the overall heat transfer characteristics with S-CO₂ as the working fluid. The results show that the convective heat transfer performance of interlaced fins is better than that of side-by-side arrangement. When the interlaced spacing is half of the parallel spacing, the comprehensive performance of heat exchanger is better with the increase of the parallel spacing. The results of airfoil microchannel heat exchanger were compared with those of the Z-shaped microchannel heat exchanger, which shows that the pressure drop of airfoil microchannel heat exchanger is only 54.174% of the Z-shaped microchannel heat exchanger when the heat transfer capacity increases by 25.67%.