Development of a Software based System for Design of Cryogenic Plate-Fin Heat Exchanger

Abstract

Effectiveness of heat exchangers is one of the important parameters which decide the effciency of helium refrigerator/liquefiers. To achieve high effectiveness, it is necessary to use plate-fin heat exchangers, which provides very high heat transfer surface area per unit volume of heat exchangers. Such heat exchangers also have benefit of low pressure drop of uid owing through it. These cryogenic heat exchangers will be placed within a vacuum chamber having vacuum of about 10-5 mbar and hence compact heat exchangers are preferred to reduce the size and cost of the vacuum chamber. As per the chosen thermodynamic configuration of indigenous HRL, it will have 8 heat exchangers.The de- sign methodologies for the plate-fin heat exchangers have been already developed at IPR and accordingly different database for uid and material properties are available at IPR. Different design codes have been developed for design and optimization of these different heat exchangers. These codes are developed using excel sheets. It is required to make one code which will be user friendly for design of these different plate-fin heat exchangers. Development of such one code with GUI is the work of this project. It needs to un- derstand the design of these plate-fin heat exchangers, how the performance of the heat exchangers can be worked out and how optimization of different parameters can be done. It needs to understand the heat transfer phenomena in the plate-fin heat exchangers.