Experimental and numerical study of thermal-hydraulic performance of an origami channel heat exchanger

To enhance the heat transfer, an innovative origami channel heat exchanger is proposed and its performance is studied experimentally and numerically. The experimental results show the maximum temperature on the origami channels' pipe wall is 2.8 °C lower than that on the flat channel with the same the heat flux of 9500 W/m2. Additionally, the temperature difference across the pipe wall of the origami channel shows a reduction of 5.7 °C compared with that across the flat channel. The simulation results show the mean heat transfer coefficient of the origami channel increases by up to 331% compared to the flat channel with the 0.012 kg/s mass flow rate. Nevertheless, the origami channel leads to an extra energy consumption penalty. To evaluate overall performances of the origami channel, this paper introduces three dimensionless efficiency factors to quantify relevant costs in terms of energy, volume and mass. It is found that the origami channel achieves much higher dimensionless mass efficiency and volume efficiency but less dimensionless energy efficiency than the flat channel. The comprehensive evaluation, which considers all the three factors, reveals that the combined efficiency factor of origami channels with folding angles ranging from 65° to 75° improves by 80% to 95% compared to the flat channel.