Author(s)

Shigeru Ogawa, Soma Usui

Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Institute of Kure College, Kure, Japan.

The paper describes the effects of heat transfer enhancement and gas-flow characteristics by wing-type-vortex-generators inside a rectangular gas-flow duct of a plate-fin structure exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) cooler used in a cooled-EGR system. The analyses are conducted using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The numerical modelling is designed as a gas-flow rectangular duct of an EGR cooler using two fluids with high temperature gas and coolant water whose flow directions are opposite. The gas-flow duct used to separate two fluids is assembled with a stainless steel material. The inlet temperature and velocity of gas flowed inside gas-flow duct are 400°C and 30 m/s, respectively. Coolant water is flowed into two ducts on both a top and a bottom surface of the gas-flow duct, and the inlet temperature and velocity is 80°C and 0.6 m/s, respectively. Wing-type-vortex-generators are designed to achieve good cooling performance and low pressure drop and positioned at the center of the gas-flow duct with angle of inclination from 30 to 150 degrees at every 15 degrees. The temperature distributions and velocity vectors gained from numerical results were compared, and discussed. As a result, it is found that the vortices guided in the proximity of heat transfer surfaces play an important role in the heat transfer enhancement and low pressure drop. The collapse of the vortices is caused by complicated flow induced in the corner constituted by two surfaces inside gas-flow duct.

Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR), Vortex Generator, Thermal Fluid Analysis, Longitudinal Vortex

Ogawa, S. and Usui, S. (2018) Heat Transfer Enhancement by Vortex Generators for Compact Heat Exchanger of Automobiles. Open Journal of Fluid Dynamics, 8, 321-330. doi: 10.4236/ojfd.2018.83020.