Browsing by Author "Lindstrom, Joel David"

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Design and evaluation of compact heat exchangers for hybrid fuel cell and gas turbine systems
(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Engineering, 2005) Lindstrom, Joel David; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: M. Ruhul Amin
Hybridized Carbonate and Solid Oxide fuel cell power plants are currently under investigation to fulfill demands for high efficiency and low emissions. Selection and design of high performance heat exchangers are essential for such applications. In this work, various compact heat exchanger (CHEX) technologies pertinent to gas-gas recuperative duties are presented. The CHEX types considered include brazed plate-fin, fin-tube, microchannel, primary surface and spiral. Based on a comparative rating procedure, two CHEX designs namely, plate-fin and microchannel were chosen for further review. Plain, strip, louver, wavy and semicircular surface geometries were then evaluated with a numerical CHEX sizing procedure. The brazed plate-fin CHEX having the louver fin geometry was determined the most conducive with hybrid fuel cell and gas turbine systems. Multiple numerical modeling efforts were carried out to develop plate-fin heat exchanger design recommendations. A model was created for the transient thermal simulation of counterflow heat exchanger partition plates. For this analysis, an alternating direction implicit finite difference scheme was written in the Java programming language to model temperature in the working fluids and partition plate.