Keeping up with my promise from last week’s blog post, I’m finally writing about another webinar I moderated in February on heat exchangers. Specifically, Selecting Proper Heat Exchanger for Process Applications.
The experts were Chris Pawlak and Sebastian Schill from API Heat Transfer. They discussed factors that impact heat-exchanger selection such as temperature and pressure and gave a great overview of various heat-exchanger features – including what makes them best suited for particular applications along with some advantages that each design provides.
Chris noted several key variables to keep in mind:
• Type of process
• Is the heating or cooling taking place as a single phase?
• Is there phase change occurring?
• Fluid types
• Flow rates
• Pressure drop
• Footprint
What are some of the advantages of a custom shell and tube exchanger? Chris says the round shape of the shell-and-tube vessel makes it an ideal choice for high-pressure applications.
Sebastian notes, “Due to higher thermal efficiency, plate heat exchangers are typically much smaller and lighter than the shell-and-tube heat exchanger.” Meaning more surface area can be installed in a smaller footprint and there is less space between the plates than between pipes. “This is especially interesting if you have expensive or dangerous fluids,” says Sebastian.
Both Chris and Sebastian went into great detail on various designs of shell-and-tube and plate heat exchangers. They also answered more than a dozen questions from our audience making this a nearly exhaustive presentation on anything and everything you need to know about heat exchangers. You can download a complete transcript of the presentation. You can also view the on-demand version of the webinar – which I recommend because there were a lot of visual elements to this event.