Design and Analysis of Heat Exchanger

Abstract

In present scenenario, heat exchangers are the hearts of any process industry, for transfer of thermal energy between fluids but in view of the accidents occurred in last decades, industries and some organizations are quite strict regarding these equipments and they had established some norms, which must be followed. So, industries are sometimes over designing to be on safer side leading to more cost and wastage of our resources.

This project describes thermal and mechanical design of shell and tube heat exchanger. It is used to serve the purpose of cooling propane vapour by cooling water as the cooling fluid. Water is kept on tube side and as propane is in vapour form,it is kept on shell side.Thermal design is based on Kern method and the results obtained from Kern method are compared with the HTRI output. Depending on temperature difference, number of shell is one and number of passes are decided based on limiting pressure drop.The design constraints are over-design percentage and pressure drop. Design of heat exchanger components is done as per the ASME codes and TEMA standard guidelines to assure that components has sufficient strength to withstand operating conditions. In order to rest equipment to ground, fixed supports are provided as per EIL dimensional standard. Also, its static analyis is done in ANSYS Version 10 and computational fluid dynamics is done in ANSYS-CFX module to check whether it is performing its intended work or not.

Following the above terminology, it is observed that although both HTRI and kern method has different fundamentals, their results are quite nearer & variation is less than five percentage. All components which are designed by ASME codes, are safe as it is observed from finite element analysis. Nozzle to shell junction is also analysed to check whether pad thickness found from ASME codes keep the junction safe or not. In addition, the temperature plot obtained from computational fluid dynamics analysis predicts that the designed is performing its intended work.