Fouling in Heat Exchangers
As was discussed before, heat exchanger are equipment used for heat transfer between two fluid flows with different temperatures. In design of heat exchangers such as double pipe heat exchanger, shell & tube heat exchanger, etc., it must be noted that there are some factors that affect the heat transfer rate during the equipment operation period. One of the most important factors is called fouling.
Heat exchanger calculator is a program written for shell and tube and double pipe heat exchanger. The full version software costs 89 USD, but the demo version works well, except you can change the shell or tube fluid flow rate. You can use this software to do your heat exchanger calculations easily and freely. More free chemical engineering software will be added soon.
In the 2nd part of this article, the calculation of convective heat transfer coefficient was explained. In a double pipe heat exchanger the internal and external heat transfer coefficients are different and it is required to use an overall heat transfer coefficient to perform the calculations.
In the first part of this article, heat exchanger design basics were introduced. In the following article, the design formulations and calculations are introduced.
As mentioned in part 1, overall heat transfer in heat exchanger in increased in the flow are set to be countercurrent. As a result, only countercurrent double pipe heat exchanger design is discussed here. To start the design of a double pipe heat exchanger, the first step is to calculate the heat duty of the heat exchanger. It must be noted that for easier design, it’s better to ignore heat loss in heat exchanger for primary design.
Double pipe heat exchangers are the simplest exchangers used in industries. On one hand, these heat exchangers have low cost for both design and maintenance, making them a good choice for small industries. But on the other hand, low efficiency of these exchangers beside high space occupied for such exchangers in large scales, has led modern industries to use more efficient heat exchanger like shell and tube or other modern heat exchangers. But yet, since double pipe heat exchangers are simple, they are used to teach heat exchanger design basic to students and as the basic rules for modern and normal heat exchangers are the same, students can understand the design techniques much easier.
Heat exchangers (HEX) are one of the most important parts of industries like chemical, medical, or many other industries. These systems are used to transfer or “exchange” thermal energy (heat) between two fluids which can be gas or liquid. Heat exchangers can be found in different types such as double pipe, shell & tube, spiral tube, plate, etc. but the two first types are and specially shell & tube exchangers are more common in industries.
