Experimental study on the thermal hydraulic performance of plate-fin heat exchangers for cryogenic applications

Efficient and compact plate-fin heat exchangers are critical for large-scale helium liquefaction/refrigeration systems as they constitute major part in the cold box. This study experimentally explores the heat transfer and pressure drop behaviors of helium gas at low temperature in four types of plate-fin channels, namely offset-strip and perforated fins, with different geometrical parameters. A series of cryogenic experiments at approximately liquid nitrogen temperature are carried out to measure the Colburn j factors and Fanning friction f factors with a wide range of Reynolds number. Besides, to reveal the performance variations under different operating temperatures, comparative experiments respectively conducted at room temperature and liquid nitrogen temperature are implemented. The results show that in comparison with the performance data at room temperature, most of j factors are relatively smaller perhaps because the lower aluminum thermal conductivity and higher Prandtl Number at low temperature. Meanwhile, the f factors corresponding to cryogenic conditions exhibit slightly larger even though the core pressure drops show considerable reductions. In contrast to the calculated results from the frequently-used performance curves (Chen and Shen, 1993), the Root Mean Squared Errors of j and f values are correlated within 8.38% and 6.97% for one perforated fin core, 41.29% and 34.97% for three OSF cores, respectively. For OSFs, further comparisons with the previous empirical correlations from literatures are conducted to verify the accuracy of each correlation. Generally, most of the calculated results predict acceptably within the deviations of ±25% for the j factors, while the predicted results express relatively large deviations for the f factors. Therefore, it may be revealed that most of the existing correlations were not able to accurately predict the experimental data in consideration of the performance differences under realistic cryogenic operating conditions, which could have significant influences during the design process of cryogenic heat exchangers.