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A CFD-based Virtual Test-rig for Rotating Heat Exchangers

2015; Elsevier BV; Volume: 82; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.egypro.2015.12.029

1876-6102

Alessandro Corsini, Giovanni Delibra, Giulio Di Meo, Mirko Martini, Franco Rispoli, Andrea Santoriello,

Spacecraft and Cryogenic Technologies

Rotating heat exchangers are used in steel industry, air conditioning and thermal power plants to pre-heat air used in steam generators or for waste heat recovery. Here we focus on a rotating heat exchanger on a so-called Ljungström arrangement operated in thermal power plants to pre-heat the air fed to the steam generators. In these devices the heat exchange between two fluids is achieved through a rotating matrix that gets in contact alternatively with the two fluid streams and acts as a thermal accumulator. To increase the heat capacity and the overall exchange surface, the rotating matrix is filled by a series of folded metal sheets. In the paper we de-scribe a methodology to account for the effects of the Ljungström in a virtual test-rig implemented in a Computational Fluid Dynamics environment. To this aim, a numerical model based on the work of Molinari and Cantiano was derived and implemented in the OpenFOAM library. RANS numerical results were compared with those of a mono-dimensional tool used by ENEL to design Ljungström heat exchangers and validated against available measurements in a real configuration of a thermal power plant.