The plate-fin heat exchanger is normally designed with the assumption that the fluid is uniformly divided among all the core passages.However

the fluid flow maldistribution in plate-fin heat exchanger may be caused by many factors

such as improper entrance configuration

poor header design

manufacturing tolerance of passages and the heat transfer process itself.The objective of this paper is to study the effects of different inlet angles on the distribution performance of distributor.It is found that there is fluid flow maldistribution in plate-fin heat exchanger and the flow maldistribution in crosswise direction is more serious than that in ordinate direction.The experimental results also show that inlet angle and Reynolds number are the main factors affecting distributor performance and the distributor reaches the best performance when its inlet angle equals 45° under the experiment.The conclusions of this paper are of great significance for the optimum design of plate-fin heat exchanger.