Effectiveness of 6-Row Crossflow Heat Exchangers Alternating Circuitry

Air-cooled heat exchangers with six tube rows are commonly seen in air-conditioning systems for large commercial and industry buildings. The analytical solutions of heat exchanger effectiveness for 6-row plate fin-and-tube heat exchangers with alternating circuitries have been derived and expressed explicitly in terms of heat capacity ratio, number of transfer units, and the dimensionless fluid temperature to the inlet of each row and section in this study. This set of exact solutions serve as a basic tool in designing heat exchanger circuitry to its most accurate effectiveness. Comparison of effectiveness between pure and alternating circuiting for 6-row crossflow heat exchangers shows that alternating circuiting could have less effectiveness than pure crossflow with identical circuiting from 1.0 to 7.9% for cases of NTUs range from 1.0 to 3.0 and capacity ratio of 0.5. Nevertheless, alternating circuit has its benefit of lowering the temperature difference between air- and refrigerant-flow, which leads to less pressure drop and less flow maldistribution, therefore resulting in better overall heat exchanger performance.