Thermal performance of automotive aluminium plate radiator

The thermal performance of an automotive radiator plays an important role in the performance of an automobile’s cooling system and all other associated systems. For a number of years, this component has suffered from little attention with very little changing in its manufacturing cost, operation and geometry. As opposed to the old tubular heat exchanger configurations used in automotive radiators, plate heat exchangers currently form the backbone of today’s process industry with their advanced performance reaching levels the designers of tubular heat exchangers can only dream of. The aluminium roll-bonding technique widely used in manufacturing the cooling compartments for domestic refrigeration units is one of the cheapest methods for heat exchanger manufacturing. Using this technique, it is possible to manufacture a wide range of heat exchanger configurations that can help augment heat transfer whilst reducing pressure drops. CFD results obtained for a patterned plate heat exchanger using the CFD code FLUENT show tremendous levels of possible performance improvement on both sides of the heat exchanger. For the internal flow, heat transfer augmentation caused by the repetitive impingement against the dimple obstructions renders such geometries equal to those of aerospace industry pin-fins whilst lowering pressure drops due to the wider cross-sectional areas. For the external flows, the wider and wavy nature of the surface area increases heat transfer leaving the addition of extra surface roughness add-ons as an option.