An open-source porous media modelling approach to investigate thermohydraulic features of compact printed circuit heat exchangers

An experimental air-foil printed circuit heat exchanger (PCHE) with CO2 as a working fluid is numerically modelled and developed within the OpenFOAM environment as a freely available package for more general PCHE designs. The conjugate heat transfer solver (chtMultiRegionFoam) is adapted to include both the hot and cold fluid streams of the PCHE, along with the solid recuperator body, within three uniquely specified overlapping mesh regions. The fluid stream momentum equation is adapted to incorporate porosity, with the additional streamwise air-foil drag (friction factor) accounted for by the Darcy–Forcheimer porous media model. A simple linear ad-hoc model for the transverse friction factor is evaluated to determine the dispersion of the momentum across the flow. Heat transfer between the fluid streams and the solid body is driven by a volumetric thermal resistance with a cell volume-weighted interpolation method (volume-to-volume coupling), with experimentally determined Nusselt number correlations applied. Temperature-dependent parameters based on isobaric NIST data for CO2 are tabulated as a user library and integrated within the coding package. The model predictions of the solid body temperature distributions are assessed and validated against experimental data with eight equidistant fibre optical measurements across the PCHE core and compared against finite-element-based MATLAB numerical results. Thermal stresses are evaluated and qualitatively evaluated against experimental data, demonstrating the capability of the model to highlight potential design features for improvement.