| Summary: | The non-uniformity of two-phase flow rates among the circuits in a heat exchanger reduces its thermal performance. In this work, the effects of a maldistributed condensing two-phase flow profile in an arbitrary cross-flow heat exchanger has been investigated. The results of a discretization numerical analysis shows that the trend of the degradation effect is similar to that found for single phase flows. The thermal performance degradation factor, D, is dependent on the standard deviation and skew of the flow profile and the change of vapour quality along the flow circuits. The magnitude of D varies as the square of normalized standard deviation and liquid Reynolds number, and linearly with the normalized skew. However, the effect of vapour quality is not
as significant as compared to that caused by the statistical moments of probability function of the flow maldistribution profile. Flows with low standard deviation and positive skew are preferred to give low magnitudes of D.
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