• Journal of computational fluids engineering
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.47-56
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• 2014

Since a typical plate heat exchanger is made up of a huge number of unitary cells, it may be impossible to predict the aero-thermal performance of the full scale heat exchanger through three-dimensional numerical simulation due to the enormous amount of computing resources and time required. In the present study, a simple flow-network model using the friction factor correlation and a thermal-network model based on the effectiveness-number of transfer units (${\varepsilon}$-NTU) method has been developed. The complicated flow pattern inside the cross-corrugated heat exchanger has been modeled into flow and thermal networks. Using this model, the heat transfer between neighboring streams can be considered, and the pressure drop and the heat transfer rate of full-scale heat exchanger matrix are calculated. In the calculation, the aero-thermal performance of each unitary cell of the heat exchanger matrix was evaluated using correlations of the Fanning friction factor f and the Nusselt number Nu, which were calculated by unitary-cell CFD model.

• Korean Chemical Engineering Research
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• v.52 no.6
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• pp.720-726
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• 2014

PEM fuel cell vehicles have been getting much attraction due to a sort of highly clean and effective transportation. The onboard fuel processor, however, is inevitably required to supply the hydrogen by conversion from some fuels since there are not enough available hydrogen stations nearby. A lot of studies have been focused on analyses of ATR reactor under the assumption of thermo-neutral condition and those of the optimized process for the minimization of energy consumption using thermal efficiency as an objective function, which doesn't guarantee the maximum hydrogen production. In this study, the analysis of optimization for 100 kW PEMFC onboard fuel processor was conducted targeting various fuels such as gasoline, LPG, diesel using newly defined hydrogen efficiency and keeping simply synthesized heat exchanger network regardless of external utilities leading to compactness and integration. Optimal result of gasoline case shows 9.43% reduction compared to previous study, which shows the newly defined objective function leads to better performance than thermal efficiency in terms of hydrogen production. The sensitivity analysis was also done for hydrogen efficiency, heat recovery of each heat exchanger, and the cost of each fuel. Finally, LPG was estimated as the most economical fuel in Korean market.