Performance enhancement of cabinet cooling system by utilizing cross-flow plate heat exchanger

•Cross-flow plate heat exchangers are applied in cabinet cooling system.•Cross-flow heat transfer could enhance cooling performance in small dimensions.•Counter-flow heat transfer is recommended when system is limited in width.•Thermal resistance can be used to characterize irreversibility of heat transfer. Gas-gas plate heat exchanger is an important component to remove heat generated from electronic devices in the cabinet cooling system. The counter-flow plate heat exchanger is usually used due to its higher heat transfer performance than the cross-flow plate heat exchanger. However, in the cabinet cooling system, the overall dimensions for the heat exchanger is limited. Therefore, it is necessary to consider the overall dimensions of the system during heat exchanger design, but the traditional thermal design method of heat exchanger doesn’t consider the effect of system parameters. In this paper, a cross-flow plate heat exchanger is proposed to improve the cooling performance of cabinet cooling system, and is compared with the counter-flow plate heat exchanger. The ε-NTU method and effectiveness-thermal resistance method are applied to evaluate the performance. It is found that for large width of cabinet cooling system, the system with cross-flow plate heat exchanger has higher cooling performance and lower thermal resistance than the system with counter-flow plate heat exchanger. When the width is 700 mm, the cooling capacity of the two systems are 176.13 W/K and 138.95 W/K, respectively. The dimensionless thermal resistance can characterize the irreversibility of the heat transfer at constant mass flow rate.