Plate heat exchanger design software for industrial and educational applications

Abstract

Plate heat exchanger is a type of heat exchanger that uses corrugated metal plates to transfer heat between two fluids. The plate corrugations are designed to achieve turbulence across the entire heat transfer area thus producing the highest possible heat transfer coefficients while allowing close temperature approaches. Subsequently, this leads to a smaller heat transfer area, smaller units and in some cases, fewer heat exchangers. In this work, an application for thermal and hydraulic computations of plate heat exchangers had been developed using Sharp Develop, an open source programming platform. During the development process, several literature methods and correlations for calculation of heat transfer coefficient and pressure drop in a plate heat exchanger have been tested and the selected four methods: Martin, VDI, Kumar and Coulson and Richardson have been incorporated into the software. The structure of the software is visually presented through several windows: a window for inserting input data, windows for showing the results of computation by each of the methods, a window for showing comparative analysis of the most important computation results obtained by all of the used methods and a help window for demonstrating the working principle of plate heat exchanger.