Novel method for assessment of thermal performance of louvered fin and flat tube heat exchangers

This study presents a simplified numerical approach for evaluating the thermal performance of louvered fin and flat tube heat exchangers (LFFTHXs), which are critical in many thermal management applications but difficult to model due to their complex geometries. The proposed method uses an equivalent convective heat transfer coefficient to represent the fins, significantly reducing the computational requirements of the simulations. Validation against the effectiveness-number of transfer units method showed average deviations of 4.4% for the novel louvered fin with two combined holes and 9.5% for conventional configurations, confirming the accuracy of the method. Further application to two-phase refrigerant scenarios using experimental data demonstrated the robustness of the method and its suitability for practical design and optimization of LFFTHXs. The approach not only improves the feasibility of thermal analysis in industrial applications but also provides a foundation for future research into more efficient heat exchanger designs.