What to Consider when Making the Buying Decision about a Heat Transfer Fluid for your System – A Report of the Webinar Hosted by Process Heating

Wright Ci

doi:10.4172/2168-9873.1000191

Abstract

This is a report from an educational webinar entitled ‘What to consider when making the buying decision about a heat transfer fluid (HTF) for your system’ where a panel of experts in the field of heat transfer fluids explained the differences between various heat transfer fluids (e.g., synthetic, glycol and mineral-based HTFs). The session was structured to provide an overview of the ‘where, when, how and why’ of using HTFs as well as the common application and requirements of HTFs and which HTFs to select for particular process applications. This webinar is available on demand and can be freely accessed by visiting the Process Heating web site.

Highlights

This webinar, entitled ‘What to consider when making the buying decision about a heat transfer fluid (HTF) for your system’, was hosted by Process heating on the 2nd December 2015 [1]
Performance and cost, and this is influenced by the application where the synthetic HTF is being used. This decision process is not straight forward and assistance from specialist manufacturers of HTFs should be sought. These talks were followed by a Q&A session and can be accessed online by visiting the Process Heating website
Some of the key takehome messages relating to high temperature HTFs are summarised below: The choice of a HTF should be based on “value” and this is a tradeoff between the cost of the HTF and the performance of the HTF

Summary

Introduction

This webinar, entitled ‘What to consider when making the buying decision about a heat transfer fluid (HTF) for your system’, was hosted by Process heating on the 2nd December 2015 [1]. “Budd” Lee, Senior Technical Service Engineer at Dow Industrial Solutions; Ryan Ritz, Global Business Development Manager at Paratherm Heat Transfer Fluids; Mark Smith, General Manager at MultiTherm; and, G.L. In describing organic HTFs, Ryan stated “The base chemistry of Organic s(mineral-oil based) HTFs consists of an intricate mixture of petroleum distillates generated during crude oil refining processes.” The main constituents are paraffinic hydrocarbons (i.e., alkanes) with traces of naphthenes (cycloalkanes) and some impurities (e.g., aromatics, asphaltenes) for lower grade organic HTFs. Ryan highlighted the potential differences between HTFs and based this on the balance between key product features which included thermal stability, heat transfer efficiency and product purity [6] (Figure 1) and ancillary features (i.e., expansion rate, flash and fire points, resistance to oxidation, start-up temperature and vapour pressure).

Results

Conclusion