3E (energy, exergy, and economic) performance analysis in the design of nanofluid wavy plate heat exchangers

The present study aims to implement energy, exergy, and economic (3E) analysis to investigate the enhanced performance of wavy plate heat exchangers (PHEs) using water-Al2O3 as nanofluid. The systematic impacts of five main geometrical and operational independent parameters of PHEs–namely hot-side inlet temperature (323–363 K), mass flow rate (1.00–2.00 kg/s), fin wavelength (2.5–100 mm), internal plate material thermal conductivity (16.3–401 W/(m.K)), and volume concentration of nanoparticles (0–4%)–on their functional output parameters were investigated using Ansys-Fluent software. These parameters include velocity and temperature variation, Nusselt number, number of transfer units, thermal efficiency, effectiveness, pressure drop, Colburn factor, exergy destruction, area goodness factor (AGF), volume goodness factor (VGF), and economic factors. The statistical method of Taguchi was used for the design of experiment (DOE), and the EES software was used to perform the exergo-economic analysis. Results show, mass flow rate, internal plate wavelength, and inlet temperature are the most significant impactful parameters. Based on the results, the Nusselt number and thermal efficiency of PHEs can be improved by 233% and 200%, respectively, with a penalty of 61% in the capital cost (purchasing components) of PHEs. The exergy destruction in the 25 studied cases ranged from 1.483 kW to 36.18 kW. It was noted that the wavy plates combined with modest nanoparticle concentration (1-2% by volume) and moderate corrugation wavelength provide the best thermo-economic result.