Optimization of an Air Cooled Heat Exchanger

Abstract

In textile industries, the raw yarn is passed from different process to enrich its quality and life. This process is carried out in a Stenter machine. In every process, hot air is passed over the yarn with different chemicals to increase its quality. Hot air generation is achieved by Air Cooled Heat Exchanger (ACHE) by exchanging heat with thermic oil. An ACHE, is simply a pressure vessel which cools a circulating fluid within finned tubes by forcing the ambient air over the exterior of the tubes. Due to high demand for heat exchangers and an increase in competition between Heat exchanger manufacturing companies, reduction in manufacturing cost through optimized design has become very important. In the present work, an analysis is performed on the presently installed ACHE and it is optimized by HTRI software using grid design and varying different parameters such as longitudinal pitch, transverse pitch, FPI, fin height, number of tubes, row and the number of passes. The optimized result generated using HTRI software is validated and compared with the analytical approach.