Condensation on the outer surface of polymer hollow fiber heat exchangers and its influence to the heat transfer

Abstract

Condensation influences significantly the heat transfer. Describing its mechanism is necessary for better understanding and leads to its beneficial use in applications. The contribution deals with the condensation on the outer surface of polymer hollow fibers that are made of polypropylene with outer diameter 0.8 mm. These fibers form the heat exchanger with total amount 2660 fibers that are divided into 20 equivalent layers. The wall thickness is approximately 10% of outer diameter. The testing air properties were set at 27 °C and 50% relative humidity that are the typical conditions for such tests in air-conditioning technology. The study focuses on the influence of the gravity and the air speed. Therefore, the polymer hollow fibers heat exchanger (PHFHE) was placed in three different positions (vertical, horizontal, and 45°) and the air velocity were chosen as 1 m s -1 and 3 m s -1 . The experiments shows that the PHFHE are able to stand up the conditions in air-conditioning applications. Moreover, they achieved the competitive results with common metal heat exchangers. The paper claims the perspective of PHFHE in air-conditioning technology.

Importance of Melt Flow Direction during Injection Molding on Polymer Heat Sinks’ Cooling Efficiency

“…Various polymer materials have found their use where, previously, completely different materials were applied. The use of polymers for heat transfer problems was generally unthinkable, but with newly found solutions, plastics have become more appealing in this area as well [1][2][3]. A lot of new research has been done in the area of thermally conductive polymers [4][5][6][7][8], and one of the possible thermal management uses of these polymers could be as heat sinks for electronics cooling.…”