Dimensionamento e simulação de um trocador de calor de placas para resfriamento de óleo em sistemas industriais

Abstract

This work presents the sizing and computational analysis of a plate heat exchanger (PHE) with a counter-current flow arrangement, designed for cooling industrial oil using water as the coolant. The main objective was to validate an analytical calculation methodology against a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation, thereby establishing a reliable numerical model for predicting the equipment's thermo-hydraulic performance. The methodology was divided into two stages. First, a complete analytical sizing of the heat exchanger was performed, determining the fluid outlet temperatures, the heat duty, the required heat transfer area, and the number of plates. For the hydrodynamic analysis, the pressure drop for each fluid was calculated using empirical correlations for the friction factor available in the reference literature. Following the analytical design, a CFD simulation was developed using Ansys Fluent software. To ensure computational feasibility, a simplified unit-cell geometric model was employed, representing an oil channel, a plate, and a water channel, with symmetry boundary conditions to simulate the behavior of the complete plate pack. The simulation results, such as the temperature, pressure, and velocity fields, were extracted and analyzed in the CFD-Post module. The model was validated by comparing the outlet temperatures and pressure drop obtained from CFD with the analytical predictions, which showed good agreement and validation between the methods. It is concluded that CFD simulation, when configured with suitable models, is a powerful and accurate tool for the analysis and optimization of plate heat exchangers.