Numerical study of differential and optimal design for multi-stream plate-fin heat exchanger

The optimal design for multi-stream plate-fin heat exchanger with differential model was investigated. An effective method for the passage arrangement was presented, together with the corresponding calculation program. With this program, many conditions with different initial lengths and slice thicknesses were calculated. The calculation results show that the initial length almost has no effect on the final divergent length, but the slice thickness has great influence on the final result. A numerical example shows the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.