Flow and heat transfer characteristics of swordfish fin microchannel

The supercritical carbon dioxide Brayton cycle is a new generation of thermal cycle used in the fourth generation of nuclear energy. As a high or low temperature recuperator of supercritical carbon dioxide Brayton cycle, the thermal hydraulic characteristics of the compact microchannel heat exchanger directly affect the power cycle efficiency. Reducing flow resistance of the temperature recuperator while maintaining high heat transfer efficiency is an important research for microchannel heat exchanger optimization design. The swordfish fin microchannel design considering bionics theory can significantly reduce the flow resistance. In this work, the swordfish fin heat exchanger model was established with supercritical carbon dioxide fluid as the flow medium. The effect of swordfish fin design with different arrangements on heat transfer characteristics was analyzed by three-dimensional numerical simulation. At the same time, the thermal hydraulic characteristics of swordfish fin design were compared with those of traditional commercial Z-shaped microchannel heat exchanger. The results show that under the same Reynolds number, the Nusselt number of the swordfish fin microchannel is twice as much as that of the Z-shaped microchannel, but the pressure drop is only half of that. Therefore, the thermal hydraulic performance of swordfish fin microchannel heat exchanger is obviously better than that of Z-shaped heat exchanger. It is obtained from optimization analysis that the optimal pitches for swordfish fin design is that the L_a = 8 mm along the flow direction, and the L_b = 6 mm perpendicular to the flow direction. (authors)