NUMERICAL OPTIMIZATION OF BAFFLE DESIGN IN A PARALLEL HEAT EXCHANGER HEADER USING CFD AND GENETIC ALGORITHM
Author(s):
Nguyen Ba Chien†*, Nguyen Dinh Vinh†, Vu Huy Khue† & Jong-Taek Oh‡
Affiliation(s):
†Department of Refrigeration and Air-conditioning Engineering, Hanoi University of Science and Technology, 1 Dai Co Viet, Hanoi, Vietnam, 10000
‡Department of Refrigeration and Air-conditioning Engineering, Chonnam National University, 50 Daehak-ro, Yeosu-si, 59626, South Korea
*Corresponding Author Email: [email protected]
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Maldistribution of refrigerant flow in parallel heat exchanger is one of the main reasons which reduces the thermal performance. This study demonstrates a numerical method to automatically evaluate the baffles height in order to optimize the flow distribution of two-phase flow refrigerant inside a heat exchanger header. This method couples the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model and a genetic algorithm to generate the optimal dimensions of multi baffles simultaneously. The numerical results show that the maldistribution of flow could be reduced up to 9 times compare to original design. Furthermore, this framework also could expand the design space, thus it could be a useful tool to boost up the design of headers using in parallel heat exchanger.