Abstract: The fluid flow characteristics in the plate of plate-shell heat exchanger was calculated and studied by adopting Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and three-dimensional numerical simulation method. The performance of different heat exchanger plates under the same working conditions was analyzed. The performance comparison in the tubes between the plate-shell heat exchanger and the ordinary heat exchanger were studied. The results show that, by taking the heat transfer coefficient α(i.e. comprehensive performance index, α=K/ΔP) of the unit pressure drop as the standard to measure the comprehensive performance of the fluid in the tube side of the heat exchanger, the comprehensive performanceis the bestwhen the oblique angle of the narrow channel of the plate-shell heat exchangeris 20° under the same tube-side flow conditionswith the advantages of small pressure loss and being not easy to scale; and the comprehensive performance index of plate-shell heat exchanger is better than that of the traditional tubular heat exchanger by 9%~26.9%. The heat transfer process isenhanced to a large extent. And this has very wide prospects for industrial application.

Key words: plate-shell heat exchanger, numerical simulation, plate-tube, pressure drop, heat transfer coefficient