Heat Exchanger Analysis: Design and Performance — Lesson 4

Liquid-based cooling solutions are gaining popularity in high-performance electronic systems such as GPUs, which produce a lot of waste heat during operation. The better the cooling of the GPU, the higher the performance that can be extracted from it. Instead of using the traditional heat sink, liquid-based cooling systems rely on a water block, which is a type of plate heat exchanger. The bottom of the water block is a flat piece of metal that sits directly on top of the chip being cooled with thermal paste in between. As the chip heats the block, the heat is extracted by the water flowing through the plate heat exchanger.

Plate heat exchangers are also widely used from household HVAC systems to industrial plants for waste heat recovery. But have you ever wondered how engineers select the heat exchangers needed for a particular application? How do they estimate the size of the heat transfer area required to obtain the optimal performance?

In this lesson we will discuss the methodologies employed in heat exchanger analysis and talk about how to perform design and performance calculations for a given heat exchanger.


Alternate video link.



Here are the handout slides for this lesson.