A High-Efficiency Micro-Channel Regenerative Heat Exchanger for Fluid Processing

O. Yildirim, and Z. Guo
Intellectual Ventures Laboratories
Bellevue, WA
Published in 2011

Regenerative heat exchangers (RHX) find widespread applications in liquid food or pharmaceutical processing as well as in reaction engineering. Whereas \"large\" RHX systems have been in use for a long time, their smaller micro-channel counterparts are a more recent area of interest.

Here, we describe the design and development of a novel micro-channel counter-current regenerative heat exchanger to thermally process a liquid stream with an exceptionally high heat recapture efficiency. The design consists of stacks of shallow inlet/outlet channel pairs and is shown to be capable of thermally sterilizing a water stream by cycling its temperature from ambient and ~ 130 C with 98% regenerative energy recapture in a compact device that requires very low energy input.

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