Experimental and numerical study on thermal‐hydraulic performance of printed circuit heat exchanger for liquefied gas vaporization

Abstract The thermal‐hydraulic performance of printed circuit heat exchanger (PCHE) through an experimental vaporization process of supercritical nitrogen was investigated. The inlet temperature of supercritical nitrogen was controlled between 113 K and 129 K, while its pressure was controlled between 4.5 MPa and 6 MPa. The mass of supercritical nitrogen corresponds to the turbulent state on the cold side of PCHE, which was maintained at 299.94 kg/h. A numerical processing of the same supercritical nitrogen flow through a single channel of PCHE cold side was presented. The numerical results were validated by comparison with the experimental data. Both experimental and numerical results showed that the increased inlet supercritical nitrogen pressure improved the heat transfer performance and pressure drop decreased with increasing the pressure at the PCHE cold side. Furthermore, the Fanning friction coefficient (f) and the Nusselt number (Nu) of supercritical nitrogen flow obtained by numerical simulation and empirical correlation were compared.