Novel Heat Exchanger Design With Rectangular Shell Geometry

Abstract

Shell and Tube Heat Exchangers (STHE) are the most versatile type of heat exchangers used in industrial applications. The shape of Shell side of the traditional STHE’s is cylindrical for industrial applications. On one hand, STHE have some good features but on the other hand, it has some limitations due to the cylindrical geometry of the shell side. Some of these limitations are maximum two shell pass is possible as per TEMA layout, complete counter flow cannot be achieved, possibility of reverse heat transfer when number of tube passes are more, tubes are always laid parallel to shell and mounting over the entire length of shell is not possible when impingement plate provided etc. The objective of this study is to design a novel heat exchanger to overcome the limitations of traditional STHE. An experimental setup has been designed with rectangular shell side for STHE. The novel heat exchanger provides the flexibility to increase the number of shell pass and complete counter flow can be achieved due to rectangular geometry of shell side. For the same heat transfer rates, the proposed novel heat exchanger design provides better Effective Mean Temperature Difference (EMTD) and hence less surface area for heat transfer in comparison with traditional STHE. The experiments have been conducted on novel heat exchangers under different operation conditions of hot and cold fluids. The experiment results are compared with theoretical estimations of overall heat transfer coefficient and Log Mean Temperature Difference (LMTD) for traditional shell and tube heat exchangers for the same operation conditions. The results show that under the same operation conditions, the performance of novel heat exchanger is much better than traditional STHE.