Optimising Heat Exchanger Design to be more effective
The below article discusses optimizing heat exchanger design to help improve the heat exchanger performance. Cost and energy was written by Peter Ellerby, Martin Gough and Peter Droegemueller who all work at Cal Gavin and have years of experience within the heat exchanger industry.
The below is only a small snapshot of the article, to read the rest of the article please register for a free account with Cal Gavin.
Process Equipment design is becoming more and more focused on by chemical and process engineers. Heat exchanger designs are now more focused around the amount of energy that plant or design will use and the amount of carbon emissions it will give off. Although this is one of the key things in the design, is it also important to take into account reducing the size as well as the cost which can be very high within the heat exchanger design. Many heat exchanger design companies and process intensification engineering companies have to pay more attention to these factors to win business within the process industry.
The roles of a Process engineer and Equipment Designer are often assigned to look into all of the above areas. However, it will usually become clear that neither of them is in a good position to optimize on all of the areas as they have specialties in one of the 4 or maybe 2 . A good example is that a heat exchanger network might be optimized for the lowest energy consumption, but the resulting heat exchanger requirements may be very expensive and large which, could have some draw backs to the ideas of having a smaller design.
To be able to consider all of the options it can be ideal for both the Process Engineer and the Heat Exchanger Designer to have freedom to work out all of the options including the space, energy, weight and cost. However, in reality, these are often separate disciplines and do not all come to the same people who might be involved with the design of the heat exchanger. Increasing the pressure within heat exchangers to focus on the energy reduction is one of the most important design aspects for heat exchanger engineers. Engineers will know about all of the heat exchanger problems and the range of turbulator’s which can also be used to increase performance. Having an understanding of all the problems and solutions allows engineers to reduce the size, cost and energy usage and more importantly carbon emissions.
Cal Gavin and various other companies who work within the process industry have a range of technologies which can reduce the size of your heat exchanger and also boost the performance and lower the emissions which might be given off by your exchanger. These applications can generally give off much better results for two phase heat exchangers but, the results can vary depending on what you have problems with and what you are trying to improve within your process plant and heat exchanger.
To be able to read the rest of this article you will need to sign up for a free account which will give you access to the rest of the Cal Gavin case studies and published papers
