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Experiment 1: The Heat Exchanger
For the heat exchanger portion of the system, Dr. Draper provided the team with a finned aluminum tubing for transferring the heat from the air to the water. A picture of the tubing can be found below. The idea was to build a shell around the tubing for the air to pass through and pass the water through the inside of the aluminum tubing.
 
Finned Tubing in Shell
This finned tubing did not have any available heat transfer information, so theoretical calculations could not be performed. Instead, a prototype of the heat exchanger was built and tested using the exhaust of a car. Tests were performed using both the counter-flow and parallel-flow heat exchanger setups. As was expected, the counter-flow heat exchanger drastically outperfomed the parallel flow heat exchanger. The setup can be seen below.
The exchanger was able to raise the temperature of the water passing through the tubing to 150 degrees in just one pass. The required water temperature was 120 degrees, so the exchanger is definately capable of transferring heat. This protoype was then adjusted so that it could be integrated into the system.
Continue on to Experiment 2 ->
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