Investigation of the thermal efficiency of a staggered elliptic-tube heat exchanger for aeroengine applications

In this paper, a numerical investigation of the thermal performance of a heat exchanger designed for aero engine applications is performed with the use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD). For this purpose, the exact geometry of the heat exchanger was modeled, and additionally the use of a porous medium methodology was adopted. For the latter the behaviour of the heat exchanger was described by experimentally derived pressure drop and heat transfer laws. The heat transfer performance of the heat exchanger can be described by the Nusselt number of the flow and the temperature distribution inside the heat exchanger. At the present work the CFD results regarding the overall and local Nusselt numbers and the temperature distributions were compared to available experimental data and were found to be in agreement. Thus, both approaches could be used for the detailed investigation of the thermal performance of the heat exchanger so that useful conclusions could be derived.