The thermal performance of an automotive radiator plays an important role in the performance of an automobile's cooling system and all other associated systems. For a number of years, this component has suffered from little attention with very little changing in its manufacturing cost, operation and geometry. As opposed to the old tubular heat exchanger configurations used in automotive radiators, plate heat exchangers currently form the backbone of today's process industry with their advanced

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... erformance reaching levels tubular heat exchangers can only dream of. The Aluminum roll-bonding technique widely used in manufacturing the cooling compartments for domestic refrigeration units is one of the cheapest methods for heat exchanger manufacturing. Using this technique, it is possible to manufacture a wide range of heat exchanger configurations that can help augment heat transfer whilst reducing pressure drops. CFD results obtained for a patterned plate heat exchanger using the CFD code FLUENT show tremendous levels of possible performance improvement on both sides the heat exchanger.