Numerical analysis of the hydrothermal performance in gasket plate heat exchangers

• Numerical modeling of gasket plate heat exchangers using ANSYS Fluent. • Detailed geometric design of corrugated plates with varying chevron angles. • Assessment of thermal and hydraulic performance under specific operating conditions. • Validation of CFD simulations against theoretical analytical calculations. • Evaluation of the impact of plate chevron angles on heat transfer and pressure drop. The growing demand for sustainable energy sources makes the application of heat exchangers an extremely important energy efficiency improvement. The plate heat exchanger is the most efficient among the heat exchangers used in the modern world. However, its drawback is its low usage efficiency. To overcome these drawbacks, CFD was employed to investigate the thermal phenomena in the water treatment processes from different angles. The CFD analysis effectively highlighted the fluid dynamics process in water treatment. A comprehensive analysis for the different chevron angles accomplished the thermal efficiency of the heat exchanger. To efficiently identify the geometrical parameters in a model, the research used efficient wavelet processing. Therefore, the parameters of the model for its effectiveness have been estimated. The proposed model efficiently determined the pressure drop in the system. Theoretical evaluation was performed for the validation process. This made it efficient to estimate the process’s thermal efficiency. Increasing the chevron angle on the plate from 20°,25°, and 30° improved the thermal performance by 1.3%. However, this procedure resulted in a 13.8% decrease in hydraulic efficiency. Therefore, this issue is notoriously highlighted because of the great importance of the chevron angles for the heat exchanger’s thermal performance.