Applied Thermal Engineering 30 (2010) 10161021

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Applied Thermal Engineering

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/apthermeng

Effect of inlet manifold structure on the performance of the heater core

in the automobile air-conditioning systems
Jun-ye Shi *, Xiao-hua Qu, Zhao-gang Qi, Jiang-pin Chen
Institute of Refrigeration and Cryogenics, School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, No. 800, Dongchuan Rd., Shanghai 200030, PR China

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Received 20 August 2009
Accepted 13 January 2010
Available online 25 January 2010
Keywords:
Aluminum heat exchanger
Flow maldistribution
Inlet manifold
Optimization

a b s t r a c t
Brazed aluminum at tube and louver n heat exchanger is widely used as the heater core in automotive
heat, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) module. It was found that the temperature distribution in
heater core surface is not equivalent, and it was considered that the ow maldistribution in the tubes
responses for this phenomenon. The purpose of this work was to enhance the performance of the heater
through optimizing the inlet manifold structure. The computational uid dynamics (CFD) was adopting
for investigating this phenomenon and nding some optimization schemes. In addition, the experiments
were carried out for this optimization. In these experiments, two samples of heater core, before and after
optimizing, were tested in an experimental facility, and the experimental results showed that the performance had improved by 1.033.98% through adding a deector in the inlet manifold. The IR pictures also
showed that the temperature distribution on the heater core surface was more homogeneous.
2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Brazed aluminum at tube and louver n heat exchanger is a
type of the compact heat exchanger with high performance and
light weight, and it is wildly used as the heater core in mobile
air-conditioning (MAC) systems [1,2]. The MAC system has the
heating function, which can heat the passenger compartment
and defrost/defog the windshield and window glasses in the cold
ambient. The automotive defrost/defog system standard is the only
one compelling standard related to safety in automotive air-conditioning system, and there is the strict requirement for the defrost
time [3,4]. A well-designed heater core can give sufcient heat to
the defrost system and short the defrost time; therefore, the performance of the heater core is very important.
The ow maldistribution in heat exchanger and its deterioration to the performance have become the subject of many studies.
Chiou [5,6] set up a continuous ow distribution model and studied the thermal performance deterioration in cross-ow heat
exchangers. Prabhakara et al. [7] modeled the heat-transfer process in a plate heat exchanger and presented a wide range of parametric studies to suggest that the effect of ow maldistribution
should be considered while analyzing the heat-transfer data. Ranganayakulu and Seetharamu [8] developed a nite elements model
to calculate the effects of inlet ow non-uniformity on thermal
performance and pressure drops in cross-ow PFHEs and found
that the performance deterioration due to the ow maldistribution
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +86 21 34206087; fax: +86 21 34206814.
E-mail address: jyshi@sjtu.edu.cn (J. Shi).
1359-4311/$ - see front matter 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.applthermaleng.2010.01.016

was signicant. Zhe Zhang, YanZhong Li [9] adopted CFD to predict

the uid ow distribution in platen heat exchangers and modied the headers to make the ow distribution more uniformly. Anjun Jiao et al. [10] conducted tests and proved the performance of
ow distribution was effectively improved by the optimum design
of the header conguration. These studies indicated that the optimization of the heaters structural design could make the ow distribution be more uniform and then could improve the heaters
performance. Yin et al. [11] developed a pressure drop model for
the whole microchannel heat exchanger and found some mass ow
maldistribution will occur because of inherent asymmetries in
turning and inlet/exit losses, ac/deceleration and/or differing ow
lengths. Kim et al. [12] investigated the effects of three header
shapes and the Reynolds number on the ow distribution in a parallel ow manifold, and because of the small pressure difference,
the triangular header produces the best ow distribution regardless of the Reynolds number. Tompkins et al. [13] performed air
water distribution studies in a transparent horizontal header with
15 microchannel tubes exiting vertically downward. They observed that distribution within the microchannel header depends
largely upon the ow regime within the header. The annular ow
eld causes signicant non-uniformities in liquid and vapor distribution among the microchannel tubes, and a stratied ow develops and the ow distribution is more uniform when mass uxes is
lower.
This paper brings forward a method to change the heater core
inlet manifold structure. This method can solve the ow maldistribution in some part of heater core. The purpose of this work is to
nd a method to improve the design of inlet manifold structure

J. Shi et al. / Applied Thermal Engineering 30 (2010) 10161021

1017

Nomenclature
Si
S
ga
U
t
p

ow non-uniformity of passage i
sum of ow non-uniformity
mean ow rate for the cross-section (kg s1)
uid velocity vector (m s1)
time (s)
pressure (Pa)

for heaters using CFD and implement the experiment to validate

the effect of the optimization.

2. The ow maldistribution in the heater

Brazed aluminum at tube and louver n heater cores were
introduced into the vehicle heating system since 1980s [1]. These
cores are more compact, lighter and more durable than that of former copper-brass heaters. A typical picture of the heater core sample is shown in Fig. 1. The geometry information of this sample is
as follows (see Fig. 2): the core depth of 27 mm, the core height of
400 mm, the core weight of 540.8 mm, ns density of 1250 ns/m,
n height of 6 mm, n gauge of 0.07 mm, tube height of 1.5 mm
and at tube number of 26.

gi

local ow rate of passage i (kg s1)

Greek symbols
q
density (kg m3)
l
dynamic viscosity (Pa s)

In this experiment, the sample of heater core was installed in a

wind tunnel which could ensure the air ow was stable and well
proportioned. So it could be assumed that the heat transfer coefcient in the air side was uniform. In most of heat transfer and pressure drop calculations of the heat exchangers, it is considered that
the ow distribution across the heater core in the water side is also
uniform. Therefore, the calculated results always show some differences from the experimental results.
In this work, it could be found that a low temperature area
including six tubes near the inlet existed in the heater core. This
phenomenon shows that there is the ow maldistribution in rst
several tubes. The low temperature area means that the water
ow rate might be insufcient and the heat transfer between
the hot water and air might be not effective in those places,
which would reduce the performance of heater core. In order
to investigate this phenomenon, the CFD simulation and experiment were carried out.

3. Optimization of the heater structure using CFD

3.1. The CFD model
The GAMBIT and FLUENT software tools have been used for the
CFD simulation in this study. GAMBIT is used for geometry creation
and mesh generation, and FLUENT is the solver.

3.1.1. Geometry and meshing

The internal walls of the heater core were picked up and composed a uid (hot water) zone. Because of this study concentrating
on the ow maldistribution, only the ow characters in this uid
zone was calculated and analyzed. The geometry of this uid zone
was showed in Fig. 3a.
The generated hybrid mesh contains 1,270,000 cells. In order to
change the internal structure of the inlet manifold during the process of the optimization, the tetrahedral elements were used in the
inlet channel. The xed parts of the geometry, the tubes and the
outlet channel, were meshed with hexahedral elements (as shown
in Figs. 3b and 3c).
Fig. 1. The heater core sample.

Fig. 2. Dimensions of the heater core sample.

Fig. 3a. The model for CFD analysis. The geometry of the uid zone.

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J. Shi et al. / Applied Thermal Engineering 30 (2010) 10161021

ulated by solving the mass and momentum conservation equation.

Continuity Eq. (3) and momentum Eq. (4) are as follows:
Continuity equation:

rU 0

Momentum equation:

@ qU
rqUU  rlrU rp
@t

Fig. 3b. The model for CFD analysis. Hexahedral elements mesh of the uid zone.

3.1.4. Boundary conditions and initial parameters

Considering for the CFD (computational uid dynamic) simulation has higher accuracy when analyzing the uid ows. This work
only concerned the heater cores ow distribution in the CFD
simulation.
The boundary conditions are as follows: the inlet was set up as
the velocity inlet; the outlet was set up as the pressure outlet;
other walls were set up as the adiabatic wall.
The initial parameters were set up according to the experiment
conditions, and the inlet velocity was changed according to water
mass ow rate (300500 l/h); the outlet pressure was set up as the
atmospheric pressure.
3.2. Simulation and optimization
3.2.1. The optimization stratagem
The ow non-uniformity in heat exchangers is generally caused
by the poor design of the ow inlet conguration [5]. Considering
the cost and processing possibility, the optimization method in this
paper was to place a deector in property location into the heater
cores inlet manifold. So the optimization stratagem is to place the
deector in different location, then compare the ow distribution
results and nd the property location. In this paper, the 1st location
is located at 5 mm deep inside the inlet channel, and the 2nd5th
location is located at from 10 mm deep 25 mm deep and the
interval is 5 mm.
As shown in Fig. 4, ve different CFD models were built to evaluate the ow distribution when the deector is in ve different
locations and the green faces are the simplied shape of the
deectors.
3.2.2. Simulation results
According to the optimization stratagem, ve different locations
of deectors were calculated and the no deector situation was
also calculated as the benchmark. Therefore, there are six cases

Fig. 3c. The model for CFD analysis. Details of the mesh in inlet manifold.

3.1.2. The evaluation of the ow distribution

In order to evaluate the ow maldistribution of the heater core,
a calculation method for the ow non-uniformities of the individual passage and the whole heater core was introduced as follows:

Si g i  g a =g a
S

n
X

jg i  g a =g a j

1
2

i1

where Si and S are the passage ow non-uniformity and the sum of

ow non-uniformity, respectively; in Eqs. (1) and (2), gi and ga are
the local ow rate of passage i and the mean ow rate for the
cross-section, respectively.
3.1.3. Flow modeling
Because only the ow character was calculated, the model was
supposed to be isothermal. Thus, the energy equation was not
solved in the simulation. In other words, in CFD, the ow was sim-

Fig. 4. Deectors ve different locations in CFD model.

J. Shi et al. / Applied Thermal Engineering 30 (2010) 10161021

Fig. 5a. The deectors inuence on the ow distribution and pressure drop. No
deector compared with the rst three deectors.

1019

was taken as benchmark to compare with the 4th and 5th deector
case.
Seen from the result, the ow maldistribution in the heater core
is evaluated by the S the sum of ow non-uniformity. Fig. 5
shows that the deector in the inlet manifold has great inuence
on the ow distribution in the tubes. When there is no deector
in the inlet channel, the ow maldistribution is very serious, and
when volume ow rate of water is 400 l/h, the S can reach 4.0.
On the contrary, the ow distribution becomes much more equal
with the deector in the inlet channel at low water ow rate.
From the Fig. 5, we can also nd the location of the deector can
inuence the ow distribution and pressure drop. It is helpful to
decide the depth of the deector in the samples inlet manifold
when the experiment is implemented. Fig. 5 shows that the 1st
deector case has the lower S, besides one peak when the water
ow rate at 475 l/h, and the 3rd cases S is also lower than that
of the 2nd case. However, when the pressure drop was taking into
consideration, the 1st deector cases pressure drop is much larger
than that of other cases as shown in Fig. 5c so the 3rd case was
chose as benchmark in Fig. 5b.
Because in most of the time, the volume ow rate of the hot
water in the heater core is contained between 300 l/h and 360 l/
h, the ow distribution in this range should be attached more
importance to. From Fig. 5b, we can nd that the 3rd, 4th and
5th deector cases have small differences, but in the range of
300360 l/h, the 3rd deector case has the lowest S. And the pressure drop results of six cases in Fig. 5c show that except that the
1st deector case will bring large pressure drop, other cases DP
has small difference. Finally, the 3rd deector location, which is
15 mm away from the inlet and between the second and third
tube, was chosen as the test location. The heater core sample with
a deector in this location would be tested in this experiment.

4. The experimental study of the heater core

4.1. Experimental test facility

Fig. 5b. The deectors inuence on the ow distribution and pressure drop. The
last three deectors.

results need to be analyzed. In order to show the analytical results

clearly, the six cases were divided into two groups. In Fig. 5a, the
no deector case was taken as the benchmark to compare with
the 1st, 2nd and 3rd deector case; In Fig. 5b, the 3rd deector case

Fig. 5c. The deectors inuence on the pressure drop.

A simplied schematic of the experimental test facility is shown

in Fig. 6.
Fig. 6 shows the schematic diagram of the wind tunnel used in
the experimental study. The meaning of equipment numbers are
listed as follows:
r Heater core sample.
s Db: dry bulb temperature sensor; Wb: wet bulb temperature
sensor.
t Temperature sensor.
u Motor drove valve.
v Flow rate meter.
w DP: differential pressure sensing.
x Multiple nozzle plate.
y Variable exhaust fan system.
Air and hot water were used as working uids. The main components of the systems were the heater core, water ow loop, wind
tunnel, room environment controller and data acquisition systems.
The wind tunnel system was designed to suck room air at the
nned side of the heater core sample by a variable exhaust fan
system. The tunnel was a rectangular duct of 270  220 mm in
cross-section. To minimize heat loss to the surroundings, the
tunnel surface was insulated with a 10-mm thick glass wool layer.
Being supported by stands of steel plate, the tunnel system was
kept 75 cm above the oor level of the laboratory.
The inlet and outlet temperatures across the air side of the heater core were measured by two T-type thermocouples. These ther-

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J. Shi et al. / Applied Thermal Engineering 30 (2010) 10161021

Fig. 6. The sketch of test rig.

Table 1
Test result of improved heater core.
Hot water volume (l/h)

300
350
400
450
500

Old type performance (W)

Air volume (m3/h)

New type performance (W)

Air volume (m3/h)

Performance augment (W)

Air volume (m3/h)

200

300

400

200

300

400

200

300

400

6180
6213
6253
6326
6407.5

8469.5
8564
8653
8824
9015

10,275
10,402
10,547
10,792
11,153

6407
6453
6502
6549
6593.5

8602.5
8729
8858
8995
9123.5

10,456
10,662
10,865
11,071
11,268

227
240
249
223
186

133
165
205
171
108.5

180.5
260
318
279
114.5

mocouples were pre-calibrated which have an accuracy of 0.1 C.

The measuring points were located at locations as described in
the ASHRAE standard. The air pressure drop across the heat
exchangers and the nozzles was, respectively, measured by precision differential pressure transducers, whose accuracies were
0.4% and 0.25%. The air ow measuring station was a multiple nozzle code tester based on the ISO 5167 standard.
The hot water ow loop consisted of a storage tank, a 100-kW
electric heater, a centrifugal pump, a control unit and a ow meter.
The purpose of this loop was to transfer heat to the air owing
through the heater core. The temperature of the hot water in the
water tank was measured by pre-calibrated RTDs (Pt-100 X) and
was controlled by the temperature controller. Its accuracy was
within 0.1 C. After heating the water to reach the required temperature, the hot water was pumped out of the storage tank, delivered to the heater core and then returned to the storage tank. The
water temperatures at the inlet and outlet of the heat exchanger
were measured by two pre-calibrated RTDs (Pt-100 X) which have
an accuracy of 0.1 C.

From the experimental data showed in Table 1, it can be nd the

performance of heater core increased dramatically with the air volume rate increasing. When the air volume rate was improved from
200 m3/h to 400 m3/h, the performance of heater core increased
from 6180 W to 10,275 W, improved by 66.3%. But when the hot
water volume rate increased from 300 l/h to 500 l/h, the performance of heater core enhanced from 6180 W to 6407.5 W, only
improved by 3.68%. The reason for this phenomenon might be
the air-side heat transfer coefcient is much smaller than that of

4.2. Experimental results

The sample with a deector in the inlet manifold at the 3rd
location was dened as the new type, and is tested in the experimental facility to compare with the sample has no deector which
was called old type. The test condition is air inlet temperature of
10 C; air ow volume rate at 200 m3/h, 300 m3/h, 400 m3/h; hot
water inlet temperature of 90 C; hot water volume rate changes
between 300 l/h and 500 l/h.

Fig. 7. The heater core performance augment ratios variation with ow rate.

J. Shi et al. / Applied Thermal Engineering 30 (2010) 10161021

1021

Fig. 8. The IR pictures comparison between the new type and old type of heater core.

the water side, so the heat transfer performance of the heater core
is limited at the air side. If we want to have more heat from automotive air-conditioning system, increasing the air volume rate can
take much more heat from hot water but increasing the hot water
volume rate cannot have such effect. In automotive air-conditioning system, the air volume ow rate is decided by blower in HVAC.
Increasing the air volume ow rate need larger size blower wheel
or higher speed driven motor, which will change the whole HVAC
design, dramatically increase cost and may cause the airborne
noise. Increasing hot water volume rate need larger water pump,
it will increase the cost and have small effect. Table 1 also showed,
with the inlet manifold structure improvement, the heater performance can be increased from 108 W to 318 W.
Fig. 7 showed that the performance of heater core augment
ratio variation with the ow rate. It was shown the performance
of heater core could be improved from 1.03% to 3.98%. When the
hot water volume rate is 400 l/h, the heater core has the highest
performance augment ratio. In comparison with the CFD simulation results shown in Fig. 5c, we could nd that the sample with
no deector has the worst ow distribution when water volume
rate is at 400 l/h. The 200 m3/h air volume rate has highest augment ratio, and when the air volume rate increased, the augment
ratio decreased because of the denominator, which would make
the total heat transfer capacity increase.
4.3. The IR camera investigation result
Fig. 8 shows that the IR picture of the so-called new type heater core compared with the old type sample. The temperature
eld of new type in the tube surface is more homogeneous than
that of the old type. The area of the low surface temperature of
the new type is also much smaller. This means that the new
type heater cores ow distribution is more homogeneous. So
the outlet air temperature distribution will be more evenly, this
can increase comfort-ability of the passengers.
5. Conclusions
The effect of adding a ow deector into the inlet manifold of
heater core on the heat transfer performance for both water ow
rate variation and air ow rate variation has been investigated.
CFD simulation was implemented to investigate the ow distribution in the water side tubes, and the result showed that 3rd loca-

tion of the deector has best ow distribution and pressure drop

characters. In experiments, the ow distribution was investigated
by the IR camera and the IR picture shows the low temperature
area can be rened by adding a ow deector in 3rd location.
The experiment data showed: for heater core air side, increasing
the air ow rate is the a effective way to improve capacity of heater
core, but it is limited by the blower design; for heater core water
side, increasing the hot water ow rate will increase the pump
power consumption but it has not obviously improved in performance; adding a ow deector is easy and low cost, the heat transfer performance of heater core could be improved from 1.03% to
3.98% by adding it into the 3rd location in inlet manifold.
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