heat pipe heat exchanger and its potential to energy recovery in the tropics

The heat recovery by the heat pipe heat exchangers was studied in the tropics. Heat pipe heat exchangers with two, four, six, and eight numbers of rows were examined for this purpose. The coil face velocity was set at 2 m/s and the temperature of return air was kept at 24°C in this study. The performance of the heat pipe heat exchangers was recorded during the one week of operation (168 hours) to examine the performance data. Then, the collected data from the one week of operation were used to estimate the amount of energy recovered by the heat pipe heat exchangers annually. The effect of the inside design temperature and the coil face velocity on the energy recovery for a typical heat pipe heat exchanger was also investigated. In addition, heat pipe heat exchangers were simulated based on the effectiveness-NTU method, and their theoretical values for the thermal performance were compared with the experimental results.