Abstract
The thermal stresses of a ceramic heat exchanger were analyzed numerically since the ceramic material is good in heat resistance but weak in the thermal stress. The analysis of thermal stress was conducted in the ceramic core with two boundary conditions depending on bolt jointing. The thermal stresses were computed by applying temperature and pressure distributions obtained from the numerical results of conjugate heat transfer to ANSYS WORKRBENCH. When number of bolt joining halls was reduced from $8\times2$ to $4\times2$, the maximum principal stresses decrease by 47.6~50.5% and increase in safety factors by 2.18~2.5 for ultimate tensile strength. Thus, it can be said that bolt joining halls should be minimized in ceramic heat exchanger to be efficient in reducing thermal stress. In addition, the width of particular gas flow passages were revised from 52 mm to 42 mm to reduce maximum thermal stresses since certain passages experienced high thermal stresses. From the revision, safety factors were increased by 13.8~14.1% for the boundary condition of $4\times2$ bolt joining halls. Therefore, it is suggested that thermal stress can be reduced by changing local geometry of a ceramic heat exchanger.
