Cross-Flow Heat Exchanger

Application ID: 173


This model solves the fluid flow and heat transfer in a micro heat exchanger made of stainless steel. These types of heat exchangers are found in lab-on-chip devices in biotechnology and micro reactors, for example for micro fuel cells. The model takes heat transferred through both convection and conduction into account.

A square cross-section is used for the fluid channels instead of circular cross-sections, often used in micro heat exchangers. The heat exchanger is of cross-flow configuration and can consist of about 20 unit cells. Because the unit cells are almost identical except for edge effects in the outer cells, you can restrict the model to a single unit cell.

The presentation file describes different solution approaches and their numerical performances for the model and belongs to a blog post about the advantages of one-way coupling in multiphysics models.

This model example illustrates applications of this type that would nominally be built using the following products: